When I read Peter Neofotis’s Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Eleven Stories, I was back in my grandfather’s kitchen. The yarn-like stories that make up this debut collection recount the life of an imagined town in northern Virginia. Unlike a traditional collection, Neofotis chooses an oral storytelling method to structure these stories, utilizing the conceit that the narrator is not just the vehicle through which we are relayed the narrative but an actual character himself, one who sits down beside us to spool out poignant stories, juicy pieces of gossip, and far-fetched legends from his small town.

Neofotis during a performance / photo from the author's website

The process of the book’s creation also sets it apart from traditional collections. One night in March 2006, Peter Neofotis recited one of his short stories from memory at Greenwich Village’s Cornelia Street Café. Afterward, café management asked him to create a one-man show. The stories he developed for that production are the very ones that have been gathered here in Concord, Virginia. And they live on not only in this collection, but also in the fact that he performs this show at various venues around the country, most recently at the Theater of the American South in Wilson, North Carolina. It also continues to be regularly featured at New York City’s Dixon Place Theater, where he still performs from memory.

Performed is an important verb here. On his website, Neofotis is pictured on stage with an old fashioned typewriter in his lap, wearing a beige suit that brings to mind costumes from The Great Gatsby. And when one reads the stories in Concord, Virginia, one cannot help imagining how the stories must sound out loud, told in character, the narrator made tangible. The tone and voice behind many of the stories is one of a storyteller rather than a writer.

For example, in “The Heiress,” the story of the town’s favored daughter, Betty Joe, who is the unfortunate progeny of a cruel and unfeeling tyrant of a father, the narrator describes her first time competing at a horse show as follows:  “Well, you wouldn’t have thought that girl was an underdog when she showed up for the first event. Betty Joe had her long dirty-blond hair pulled back in a tight French braid and had polished every buckle and stirrup so well, light two-stepped off them.” Perhaps it is the use of colloquial language, or the closeness generated by the way the narrator refers to Betty Joe as “that girl,” but it is clear we are not receiving the story from a distant writer at a computer. Rather, it comes from a friend, someone who has watched Betty Joe grow up, a citizen of the town who has taken us in to tell us a story.

Enhancing that storyteller’s style is the content of the stories. They have much in common with traditional rural, Southern fiction, calling to mind classics from Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, but because of the storyteller mode, there is a tendency towards hyperbole. What makes a yarn a yarn rather than just a good story? A smile playing at the lips of the teller? Exaggeration? Perhaps a don’t-blame-me-I’m-just-telling-you-what-I-heard attitude? Yes. These are all present in Neofotis’s style. Yet despite containing outrageous content, many of these tales take a realist approach: the opening story, “The Vultures,” tells the story of a hunter who accidentally kills his wife on a hunting trip, swears off guns, and then comes home one day to find his yard inexplicably full of vultures; in “The Heiress,” Betty Joe’s no-good father attempts to cheat her out of her inheritance, so she decides to kill him, and with the help of some of the townspeople, gets the case closed as accidental death. None of these tales exceed the bounds of reality; they are firmly set in the real world, one confined by space and time, however exaggerated they seem.

Other stories, however, dwell in memory and mystery. “The Stone Carver,” for instance, is a haunting story of the town artist, Jethro O’Pitcans, who fell down a mine shaft as a child and hit his head, rendering him unconscious and lost for two days. After, he swears he saw the Virgin Mary. In the present narrative of this story, black snakes have infested the town, and deep in the mineshaft where he works, Jethro uncovers a fossilized pterosaur, wings spread so as to look like a crucified figure. Neofotis balances the fantastical elements of this story with running commentary from Rachel, the town journalist, who attempts to set the whole affair down as fact. When Jethro asks her to come into the mineshaft with him, the narration stays close, explaining in beautiful imagistic prose the things Jethro knows and sees. Neofotis writes:

The Virgin Mary appeared, with serpents in her hair. She embraced him. He felt her mane slithering against his lips, earlobes, and jaw. And he knew that at the Place of the Skull, she had wanted to answer her son’s question. She also wished that she could have jumped, flown up to the cross, and ripped out the nails in his arms and feet. Then, with her son on her back, she could have soared away from Jerusalem, God, time, and written culture—to where no salmon-pink stone building society existed. Jesus did not have to be a revolutionary, just as Jethro did not have to be considered a fool. He could just have been her son, she his ma, and they could have lived by the sea in the giant fern, cycad, or coniferous trees. A landscape without grass, seeds, or fruits—just green.

While Jethro is in the throes of his vision, Rachel snaps pictures of him and the statue. Rachel is the one who drags him out of the shaft after he gives up, after he gives himself over to the place where he almost died once before, and where he seems bound to die again.

Jethro’s visions and religious babbling, his prayers, his surrender—“Without a psalm, I no longer live,” he says—make the character seem insane, or, at least for that moment, insensible. When read with a storyteller’s style, however, Jethro holds rhetorical power. He has the attention of the audience, and he’s not merely a madman but one of the townspeople. He has narrative authority. The oral storytelling style utilizes that authority, that rhetorical power, to play out what might otherwise be a crazy man’s magical story of religious visions. Though we get this story not from a live performance but from the page, we understand that the theatrical element is firmly in place. The rise and fall of his voice, the panic, the despair, the surrender, all play out in real time. Jethro is fantastical, Rachel is objective. Magic and realism are merely a matter of perspective.

Neofotis Performing / photos from The Cornelia Street Cafe

As with most things, in this book’s strength also lies its weakness. The very tone and voice that create the storyteller effect in the book can also, at times, be problematic. Specifically, the lack of continuity that is created by the stylistic decision to opt for a disembodied, “true” narrator for some stories, while choosing an anonymous-yet-present narrator who belongs to and speaks for the town in others. For instance, until I reached the fourth story in the collection, I was under the impression that the narrator was a separate omniscient presence, uncharacterized and uninvolved with the story—merely the vessel. However, when I reached “The Heiress,” the narrator became characterized, and considerably more intimate with the characters and the story at hand. Several others in this collection operate in the same vein of narration, most notably “The Flag Bearer” and “The Abandoned Church.” Most of the rest of the stories, meanwhile, maintain that separate narrative presence that the book began with, leaving the reader to decipher when they are in the hands of a town citizen or an uncharacterized, true narrator.

When we imagine the stories as being performed, the narration can be easily adapted to the performer, much like roles being bestowed upon actors in a play. Even when the narrator is a citizen of the town, we can see the person right in front of us, in costume, and we know they belong, they have authority, and we forgive any inconsistencies that take place. For instance, at the end of “The Heiress,” when Betty Joe shoots her father, the narrator (who we have heretofore taken as a citizen of the town—“our town,” as he/she puts it—but someone who is not present at the scene of the crime, and thereby has a limited perspective) describes the moment with omniscience:

[Betty Joe] took careful aim and fired—hitting her father in the top part of his backbone, right below the neck. The minié ball crashed through the upper regions of his heart, causing him to stumble into the bramble of a wineberry bush. The bullet burst out of his sternum just at the place where the rusty juniper trees begin, and at just that moment, Mrs. MacJenkins and the rest of the Concord Bridge Club sat smiling over their fresh iced tea.

When read with a performance in mind, the irregularity of a shifting point of view can be forgiven. The folksy tone of the story and the sympathy the reader has for Betty Joe may make a reader shrug and let the error go. After all, we know by virtue of the book’s creation process that the story was originally performed by the author in costume. The delight of the performance and the singular nature of the book’s creation trumps these minor contradictions. However, in the face of more uncomfortable material, such as the use of racist language, these errors in point of view affect more than just the suspension of disbelief.

Because these stories are set before and during the Civil Rights Movement, it would be dishonest as an author and naïve as a reader to pretend that characters in a rural northern Virginia town would completely abstain from racial slurs. Characters in the stories are bound to, and do, exhibit racist and homophobic sentiments. When these sentiments occur in dialogue, that is one thing—we can attribute them to that character and put it down to his/her particular characterization. But when they are channeled through the retrospective narrator, who is our present-day guide through these tales, the storyteller’s style complicates our ability to distinguish between the author and the narrator. Or, more specifically, the point of view issues created by this technique make it unclear at certain moments how the author wants us to see and judge the narrator.

“The Flag Bearer,” for instance, is the story of the town’s loyalty to a woman, Violet Graves, whose son died of brain tumors that he acquired after his tour in Vietnam. The present action of the story is an annual barbecue on July 4th at Violet’s house, and leads up to the traditional moment when she burns an American flag while the whole town salutes her.

The story opens with an explanation of the setting—where and when, what people are eating, etc. The narrator uses the second person plural pronoun “we”: “And out in that yard, we eat kale, black-eyed peas, and whatever else old Violet Graves has cooked up. In jovial fashion, we ask each other how the summer is going.” The narrator, then, is part of this scene, a visitor at Violet’s house, familiar enough with Violet to call her “old Violet Graves.”

When the narrator switches gears into backstory, he/she continues with the collective pronoun usage: “Since the only savings of many folks in Concord were chests full of Confederate currency (which we are still hoping will be recognized someday!) Eli and Mildred were able to buy up most everything around here.” In the next paragraph, the narrator explains the story of how Eli and Mildred raised a black servant’s baby, Violet, who would grow up to be the same Violet Graves of the present action, educating her and training her to help with Eli’s business. The town’s reaction is explained thusly: “Despite our initial apprehension about a learned charcoal, Violet proved not only to be sharp mentally but also smooth socially” [emphasis mine].

Now, my guess is that Neofotis has no intention of asking us to laugh along with this sort of racist remark. Nor does he probably want us to merely ‘tut-tut’ at the narrow-mindedness of a previous generation, only to let them off the hook because of age. The appropriate response here is shame and outrage—both that this type of thinking ever occurred, and that it still persists in parts of the country. Yet without the clear-cut boundaries established by point of view, it’s difficult to understand how the author has positioned the narrator. And, in turn, how we should trust him.

Frederick Reiken / Photo from Emerson College faculty page

In his article “The Author-Narrator-Character Merge: Why Many First-time Novelists Wind up with Flat, Uninteresting Protagonists,” Reiken points to several reasons why this merge can occur. But the one that seems most apt with regards to this situation he calls the “so-called ‘fallacy of imitative form’ or imitative fallacy,” which happens because of “an unintentional, unconscious merging of narrator and character.” He continues, saying:

Because there is never any distance between narrator and character, there is no apparatus for translating and contextualizing the character’s thoughts, visions, and actions (if there are any). As a result of this lack of separation, a boring character begets a boring narrative, and hence a boring story. Likewise, a disoriented character begets a disoriented story…One very common and often uncomfortable workshop situation pertaining to the imitative fallacy is that in which a sexist character begets a sexist story, and in which the author is held, and rightly so, accountable for the sexism. In contrast, a successful ANC separation would make possible the objective presentation of a sexist character, with no sense that the author is complicit, or is asking us for our complicity in, the sexism. This is true, for instance, of the book Lolita, in which the soundness of ANC separation becomes particularly apparent when unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert reaches the point at which he fails to understand that he has lost the sympathy of his reader. Like Holden [Caufield], Humbert is quite clear on the logic of his own story, but we as readers—as a result of author Vladimir Nabokov’s objectivity—come to understand Humbert as the well-mannered pedophile and monster that he is. The book itself, as structured in author Nabokov’s mind as well as on the page, never asks us for our approval or empathic participation in the pedophilia, which is why the novel never once devolves into pornography.

Neofotis’s stories are voice-based. The storytelling style depends on colloquialism, accent, affectations of rural Southern dialect and lifestyle—describing a building’s location as “yonder,” making sure to mention foods and flowers. It would be understandable, then, that Neofotis sought authenticity in the voice of his narrators, even to the point of extremes such as allowing the narrators to use racist language—not just in dialogue, but in the “telling” Itself. In “The Flag Bearer,” the narrator has no name, no face, and does not directly effect the present action of the story. This narrator is a vessel for information, exhibiting both omniscience and distance, and does a good job of establishing setting, voice, and characterization. The racist rhetoric of the narrator, then, is problematic rather than constructive because an author-narrator-character merge has occurred, leaving the reader feeling unsettled by the language, effectively kicking us out of the fictional dream.

It has been a long-standing debate—especially among Southern writers—about how to handle racist characters. Should the author omit racist moments from a story, even though a racist character is present, out of consideration for readers? What about in stories that take place prior to the Civil Rights Movement? Don’t we risk perpetuating these stereotypes if we continue to dwell on and record them? I think the answer to these questions is no. Each new generation encounters racism in a unique way, and those stories should be set down, illuminating the human condition at any given time. An author needn’t shy away from the difficult theme of racism, but he/she should proceed with caution, as well as an understanding of his or her responsibility as an artist.

But setting aside the argument about what “duty” we have as writers, perhaps consider the issue simply in terms of expending a reader’s intellectual energy. No matter if an author is tackling racism, sexism, homophobia, or any number of topics, there is always the need to create a consistent narrative structure. Without it, the reader spends all her time negotiating the boundaries between author and narrator and characters, expending an unnecessary amount of energy trying to sort out who is who, rather than losing herself to the dream of fiction.

As a way of thinking more clearly about this dilemma, Reiken offers the following model as a way to effectively visualize the separation and interplay of this complex relationship:

In this model, the author-narrator-character relationship may be envisioned as a wave-state simultaneity or superposition—to borrow the language of quantum theory—in which author, narrator, and character are at once both separate and simultaneous, since, literally speaking, they all derive from a single human mind. In this model the ANC separation still occurs, however, because the author constantly modulates between the three domains—alternately immersing himself in the consciousness of the character, then pulling back to the expository commentary of the narrator, while all the while shaping the narrative from the objective perspective of the author. In this sense, the ANC might be thought of metaphorically as a spectrum, at once both wave and particle, and an effective manipulation means having the ability to envision the separation between these domains while at the same time understanding that they are always consubstantial. As author you must understand that, on one hand, you are your narrator(s) and character(s), while on the other that crafting effective narratives requires structuring these domains hierarchically within your imagination, so that at any moment you are able to collapse the wave-state simultaneity and crash down momentarily into one of the discrete domains. The diagram might look something like this:

That is to say, the separation between author, character, and narrator must be distinct and consistent. We must always know where we stand in relation to the narrator, especially if that narrator is an unreliable one. Our position as reader or audience member must be outside the story, where the author resides, able to assess the narrator and the story’s character(s) from a distance. Because when that boundary blurs, we risk losing the objectivity necessary to gauge what’s humorous from what’s in poor taste, and to judge what’s harmful from what’s benign.

On stage most of this wouldn’t be an issue. An actor is, by definition, not the author—even when he is, as in this case. He is playing a role, as his costume makes clear, and that role is a fiction. But translated from the stage to the page, we lose those markers. We lose those temporal boundaries. We lose that structural artifice. The stories are being related to us in the present, via a storyteller, and so we must assume that the narrative voice is retrospective, with the full benefit of historical hindsight in place. Each form has its costs and benefits, and I believe that in an attempt to fully “inhabit” the voices of his characters in the medium of fiction in the same way that he does so on stage, the psychic distance between author, narrator, and character occasionally becomes so thin that it detracts from the true art of these tales rather than adds to them. From a craft perspective, those stories that let in a bit more light between those categories were the most successful ones for me.

In a final note on the structure and approach of this book, I want to line up Concord, Virginia with its canonical neighbors, particularly highlighting the storyteller’s style, the oral quality of the narration, and how that helps or hinders the stories. This book could be aligned with other collections of connected stories—Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, perhaps, or Clifford Garstang’s In an Uncharted Country. However, the work I think it is truly in conversation with is not a novel or collection of stories, but rather Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Thornton Wilder, 1948. From the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, via Wikimedia Commons

Thornton Wilder said, “The theatre is supremely fitted to say:  ‘Behold! These things are.’ Yet most dramatists employ it to say:  ‘This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.’” Similarly, listening to my grandfather spin yarns was never intended to teach me a lesson. There was no moral, and the things I took away—a healthy appetite for gossip and storytelling, as well as a whole catalog of swear words—were left up to me. Likewise, Peter Neofotis’s stories align with Our Town in that they are the stories of people, but even more so of a town that is changing. Neofotis is not using his book as a pulpit from which to say that the Vietnam War was senseless, or homophobic intolerance is despicable, or religion practiced without love is hardly religion at all. As a reader, I might glean these things on my own. But at the base level of the stories, I am shown how things are, not what I should learn from them. This is to his credit. So despite the occasional misstep, Neofotis has done a wonderful thing with this collection: he has captured what it is to be human in a particular place at a particular time.

Still, the greatest strength of Concord, Virginia might be the way in which these stories function collectively to tell us something about ourselves, in the here and now, despite how focused they seem on the past. The final story, “The Ancients,” recounts a government plan to build a dam in the river valley, kicking the town’s oldest citizens out of their homes. Neofotis poetically draws the line between these people and the river that binds them:  “For a human, time means a progression from conception to birth to maturity to cricketness to dust. A waterway, on the other hand, may meander as it grows older, but it does not weaken if the climate stays.” Indeed, “The Ancients” ends with the town’s elderly giving “that wild river one last dive,” jumping in as the water rises. It is this sense of the temporary, fleeting nature of life in Concord—the way times change, and people grow, and perish, living large to the last—that provides a contemporary reader with both a feeling of recognition and solidarity. For we understand through the collection as a whole that each individual, in however limited or short-lived a fashion, plays an integral part in the broader fabric of the community, and that every place—even these communities that seem to exist out of time—will continue to shift and evolve like a river between its banks.

So I finish the book with the sense of a fulfilled promise, happy to have accepted the invitation delivered like an appeal to the muses in the prologue:  “Be it God or Gossip—the chorus sings of a particular community, in a certain valley. It is we, the voices of Concord, Virginia—replenished by a mountain river—inviting you, friend, to swim in our abiding story.”

East Concord, Virginia / Image from Peter Neofotis's website

Further Links and Resources:

• For more information about Peter Neofotis, including the origins of Concord, Virginia, reviews of his work, and tour information for his one-man show, please see the author’s website.
• To hear some of Neofotis’s own thoughts on his process and the experience of performing his work, here is a Q&A with the author that Kevin Kittredge conducted for the Roanoke Times in 2009.
• Neofotis also discusses how his writing and his performances have been shaped by James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis” in this brief piece for Beatrice.
• You can also read a 2004 interview with Frederick Reiken that Eric Wasserman conducted for Poets & Writers magazine. In it, Reiken discusses his father’s opposition to his decision to pursue a life as a writer.
• Finally, here is a clip of Neofotis performing his story “The Heiress” at Theater at Lime Kiln in Lexington, Virginia:

I’ve known for a long time that I disagreed with this, but it took Andrew Porter’s debut collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, to help me figure out exactly why. These are, in every sense, well-made stories–beautifully paced, full of lovely sentences that you’ll want to read aloud just for the pleasure of it. But Porter’s technique is not a substitute for emotional depth or story. The placid surfaces of his characters’ lives crack open when the reader least expects it. Holes, both literal and figurative, open up in unexpected places. Appearances are deceptive, and miscommunication leads to tragedy. These stories are not objets d’art, but nested boxes. Their surface beauty leads us deeper, toward hidden and surprising truths.

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was recently republished in paperback by Vintage/Random House.

Foreign editions of The Theory of Light and Matter have also been published in both the UK and Australia, and will be published in translation in France, The Netherlands and Korea. In addition to winning the Flannery O’Connor Award, The Theory of Light and Matter also received Foreword Magazine’s 2008 Book of the Year, was long-listed for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was selected by both the Kansas City Star and the San Antonio Express-News as one of the Best Books of 2008.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Porter has had stories published in One Story, Epoch, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” He currently teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio. I first met him in the late nineties, when we worked together at the Center for Talented Youth at Loyola Marymount University. This interview was conducted by email in May-June 2010.

Interview

MARY STEWART ATWELL: In Time Out New York, David Levinson called you “a rubbernecker with a gimlet eye.” Do you consider yourself a rubbernecker? Are most of your stories informed by something you’ve actually observed?

ANDREW PORTER: That’s always a tough question to answer. On the one hand, the plots and the characters in my stories are completely fictional, but on the other hand, a lot of the small details that inform the plot and make up the characters aren’t. For example, I might have a character who embodies several qualities of people I’ve known and the details of this character’s life might be connected to places I’ve lived, jobs I’ve had, or stories I’ve heard, and so at a certain point it becomes hard to know where to draw the line between observation and imagination. My imagination may have created a particular character, but more likely than not the details and personality traits that make up this character are rooted in things I’ve observed.

The first story in your collection, “Hole,” is told by an adult remembering a traumatic event of his childhood, when his best friend and neighbor disappeared into an abandoned sewer in his backyard. This story could have been told in linear form and present time, but you chose to give a retrospective dimension, and also an element of unreliability–the narrator tells us that he tells the story differently every time, so we’re not completely sure that the story he’s telling us is the true one. Can you talk about how you arrived at these structural decisions?

photo credit: jam343

In writing “Hole,” I think I realized early on that this was going to be a story about memory and the way our minds reconstruct memories, particularly memories of traumatic events, and so I wanted to use a non-linear structure that kind of mirrored this process. In other words, I think I wanted the structure of the story to tell us as much about the narrator as the story itself—the fact that he keeps repositioning himself, jumping around in time, approaching the event from different angles. In my experience at least, this is the way most people’s minds work, at least when they’re trying to remember something traumatic. And I don’t know that I could have achieved this effect as well had I simply used a linear approach.

The review of Theory… in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggested that the development of your style had a lot to do with the tradition of the short story associated with your alma mater, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. How do you think that Iowa–both your experience there and the literary tradition it represents–has influenced your work?

I think my two years at Iowa were probably the two most important years in my life, at least in terms of my development as a writer, though this wasn’t because I was producing a lot of work while I was there or because the work itself was particularly good. I think it had more to do with the fact that I was surrounded by so many other people who were serious about writing and who worked extremely hard to produce good work. I’d never been around so many serious writers before, and it had a very profound effect on me. As for the tradition of the program, all I can say is that we were all very aware of it, of course, and while it may have created some anxiety at times, it also probably made us work even harder.

Which writers were you encouraged to read at Iowa? What lessons did you learn from them?

Junot Diaz / photo credit: Oquendo

I can’t remember any of the professors encouraging us to read specific writers, but I know that I was introduced to the work of a lot of new writers through conversations with friends. In fact, I think I thought I was pretty well read before I arrived at Iowa, where I met people whose personal libraries put mine to shame. Anyway, there were definitely certain writers who people were talking about—young writers, like Junot Diaz, who was just starting out, and recent graduates of the program, like Nathan Englander, and Chris Adrien and Julie Orringer, who were just starting to get their stories in print. There was a lot of fascination with young success at that time, which is probably pretty typical in any MFA program.

Barry Hannah was a teacher of yours, and he provided a glowing blurb for your collection. What was it like working with him? How do you think that he will be remembered, as a teacher and a writer?

Barry was a real character and a wonderful teacher. Probably the funniest human being I’ve ever met, but when it came to workshop, he had an amazing critical eye. Maybe it came from decades of teaching, but he had this ability to see right to the heart of any story and to tell you exactly what needed to be done. And, of course, I have a lot of fond memories of hanging out with him during his time there, and I’m also very grateful for his friendship and his steady encouragement during some of those difficult years right after. To be honest, it’s kind of hard to sum up a person like Barry in a few short sentences, but I can tell you that he’s dearly missed by everyone who ever had the privilege of getting to know him.

Several reviewers have compared you to Carver, others to Cheever, and you’ve mentioned Dybek as an influence. Were there other writers you went back to when you were writing these stories?

Yes. Probably too many to name. Richard Bausch, Stephanie Vaughn, Tobias Wolff, Junot Diaz, Jayne Anne Philips. There were certain books, like Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, that I probably pulled of my shelf at least once a week.

What is your favorite Dybek story?

“Pet Milk.”

That’s a fantastic story, but I’m curious about why you chose it. “Pet Milk,” like many of your own stories, brings together layers of narrative, and the last paragraph gives us three different time perspectives in the same moment. Is it partly that nostalgic quality in the story that appeals to you?

Yeah, I think that’s definitely a part of it, but I also like the fact that virtually nothing happens in that story. I mean, it’s just about a moment, a small moment, but it’s captured so beautifully and written so elegantly that it somehow works. In some ways I feel like that story is held together almost entirely by the language and the imagery—the swirling pet milk connecting to the King Alphonse drink and then connecting again at the end to the swirling image of the train. It’s almost like a poem in that sense, which I guess isn’t that surprising considering Dybek was a poet long before he was a fiction writer.

I recently heard Junot Diaz say that for him, the untranslated Spanish in his work represents the part of any book that has to remain a mystery–that can never be completely grasped, even by the best reader. Your stories contain a lot of what, for the lack of a better word, I’ll call lacunae–letters that are referred to but not included in the text, events that are described in such a variety of ways that the truth about them remains opaque. What do these figurative white spaces in the narratives mean to you?

When I finish writing a story, I always like for there to be certain unanswered questions. I want the reader to feel satisfied, of course, but I also like for certain things to remain unknown. I guess it’s simply my way of reminding the reader, and perhaps myself, that none of us can ever really know the “true” story, that there are always going to be certain unanswered questions.

In the story “Azul,” a couple hosting a teenage exchange student make a number of bad decisions that almost lead to the student’s death. However, the narrator in particular is so likable and honest that the reader may sympathize with him in spite of herself. Did you always know that things were going to go wrong for this couple, or is that something that became clear to you as you drafted the story?

That’s an interesting question. In the initial version of that story, which didn’t include the accident at the end, I kind of let the narrator and his wife off easy. The story still ended at the party, but it was a very quiet, almost meditative sort of ending. It wasn’t until later, after I showed the story to my girlfriend (now my wife), that I realized that the ending needed to be changed. I think what she said to me was something along the lines of “Are you really going to let this couple get away with acting like this?” In other words, where there was so much bad behavior, so much irresponsibility, there needed to be some consequences. And though I’m usually resistant to changing my endings once I’ve written them, I realized that this time she was absolutely right.

Is sharing the story you’re working on with friends and family usually part of your revision process? If so, could you comment on how that influenced another story in the collection?

My wife is probably my main reader at this point, and I basically show her everything. When she says something is finished, or when she says something is ready to be sent out, she’s always right. In fact, some of the stories in my collection—like “Departure” and “Connecticut”—might have never left my hard drive had she not been so enthusiastic about them. I tend to second guess myself a lot, and so it’s nice to have someone else there whose opinion you trust. As for another specific example, all I can say is that the stories that made it into the collection were generally those stories that got the thumbs up from her.

photo credit: Aunt Owee / In *Departure,* Amish teens gather at a south-central PA diner, to the fascination of teens from the public high school. Porter explores what happens when the 'English' date Amish girls or fight Amish boys, commenting subtlely on the troubled present and future of the Amish way of life.

In my favorite story in the collection, “River Dog,” the college-bound narrator is told that his ne’er-do-well brother’s rape of a local girl “has nothing to do” with him–something that he clearly can’t accept. Many of your narrators are faced with a similar dilemma, unable to believe that they’re not somehow responsible for the tragedies and crimes they witness. Were any of these stories written from a different point of view in an earlier draft, and if so, why did you decide to change them?

To be honest, I can’t remember ever changing the point of view of any of these stories, though I have played around with the idea of writing additional stories from the perspectives of some of the secondary characters. I think once I arrive at a point of view I tend to stick with it. I may end up abandoning the story, but I never really change the lens through which I’m telling it.

Beginning fiction writers are often told not to have narrators who observe more than they act, because it’s not interesting to the reader. Of course if writers followed this advice, we wouldn’t have The Great Gatsby, or Tristram Shandy, or some of Alice Munro’s best stories. Why are peripheral narrators useful, both to you and to writers in general?

Frank O'Connor

That’s a great question. I often give that same advice to my own students, though of course I don’t always follow it myself. To be honest, I don’t know that it’s something I’m thinking about a lot in the early stages of writing a story. Usually I’m just trying to figure out who the character is, and what the character wants, and what might be troubling the character. And I guess often times what’s troubling the character is the very fact that he or she feels isolated or alienated within the world of the story. In other words, the peripheral perspective kind of grows out of the character’s conflict, or perhaps is the conflict, the fact that the character feels somehow on the periphery of his or her own world. This kind of relates to what Frank O’Connor argues in his famous essay “The Lonely Voice” —that short stories tend to be about outsiders and outcasts, people who feel alienated or marginalized within their immediate communities. So perhaps that’s one important advantage of this type of peripheral perspective—it can serve to underscore the character’s own sense of alienation—something that, say, a character like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby certainly feels.

Many reviews of your collection have spoken about the themes and locales that recur in your stories, but there also seem to be some sentence-level echoes between them. There are several minor and major characters named Alex, for instance, and more than one character is described as “not right” in the head. How would you describe the common world that these stories inhabit? Did you think of them as linked, and if so, in what ways?

I never really thought of the stories as being linked, but it’s true that there are lots of echoes between them, thematic and otherwise. In some ways theses echoes—for example the repetition of the phrase “not right” in several of the stories—were things I only noticed after the collection had been published, when people brought them up to me. In other words, they were purely accidental, but I suppose on some level it’s not that surprising. I mean, there are so many things going on in our minds on a subconscious level, so many strange connections being made, so many common themes and images that keep reappearing, that it seems inevitable that these type of repetitions might occur.

You said in another interview that before you got serious about writing fiction, you wanted to be a filmmaker. When you write fiction, do you ever think about how you would shoot it as a film? Are there any other ways in which the language of film is useful to you as a fiction writer?

I don’t know that I’ve ever made that connection before, but I suppose on some level my process is very similar to a filmmaker’s process. I don’t write my stories in a linear way, for example. I tend to just generate a lot of raw content, and then go back later and piece it all together, much like a filmmaker goes back and edits a film. And when I think back on my early interest in film and becoming a filmmaker, I remember spending a lot of time thinking about scenes, scenes that weren’t necessarily connected to larger stories. I remember thinking about what type of lighting I might use, what type of music I might use, and so forth, even when I didn’t know how the scene itself might connect to something larger, and this is very similar to the way I approach fiction writing. I just start with small moments and build from there.

photo credit: Jim Sneddon

Are you also writing your novel in individual scenes, then revising those scenes as parts of a whole?

No, I actually wrote the first draft of my novel in a much more linear way. I went section be section, chapter by chapter, but within individual chapters I suppose I used a similar approach, generating a number of different scenes, or versions of a scene, before deciding how I wanted to piece the whole thing together later.

How is the novel going? When will it be out?

I have no idea when the publication date will be, but it’s going well so far. I recently completed a very rough draft of the novel and will be trying my best to finish a final draft by January. We’ll see. I tend to be pretty superstitious when it comes to talking about works in progress, but I can say that the novel is set in Houston and that it involves a family going through a crisis.

It seems to me that the position of many of your narrators, looking back on their own pasts with compassion, humor, and sympathy, is in some way analogous to the position of the teacher who may see in his students versions of his past self. You’ve been a teacher of creative writing for some time now. How does being a teacher affect your work, in positive and/or negative ways?

One of the great rewards of teaching for me has been seeing some of my former students actually begin their own careers. At this point some of my earliest students have already completed their MFA degrees and are now out in the world, publishing stories, picking up teaching jobs, going to the AWP Conference, giving readings, and so forth. And it honestly make me so happy to see this. And yes, this is partly because I remember myself at their age, and I see them going through the exact same things I went through, and I remember of course how exciting and how terrifying it was. And so I guess that’s one of the nice benefits of teaching for a certain number of years. You begin to see the results of your efforts, but you also remain in close contact with a younger generation of writers, and you begin to see your relationship with these students changing. After a while, they stop seeing you as a mentor and start seeing you as a friend and a fellow writer, and that in itself is inspiring.

You’ve had the experience of hearing your work read by actors, both on NPR’s Selected Shorts and at an event at the Knitting Factory that included Rainn Wilson and Amy Brenneman, among others. What was it like to hear your stories read in voices other than your own?

Eric Stoltz reads from *The Theory of Light and Matter* / photo credit: One Story

To be honest, it was completely surreal, especially the actor event in Hollywood. To see someone like Eric Stoltz, who I’ve admired for years, or Justine Bateman, who I watched on TV as a teenager, read my work, it’s kind of hard to describe. But I also have to say it was very educational. I mean, you realize why these people are called professionals. I remember that Justine Bateman did a very humorous reading of the title story in my collection, a story that I’d never really considered very humorous before, and I remember realizing then how much could be achieved simply by pausing in the right places, by controlling your delivery. And so that was wonderful to see, another person reinterpreting my story in a way I’d never considered before.

Who are some fiction writers, past or present, who we should be reading but probably aren’t?

Two of my favorite short story collections—Mark Costello’s The Murphy Stories and Stephanie Vaughn’s Sweet Talk—have both gone out of print, and so if there’s any way you can track down a copy of either of those collections, I’d certainly recommend reading them.

And there are some wonderful collections that have come out in the past year—Lori Ostlund’s The Bigness of the World and Laura Van Den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, for example—that really impressed me. And then of course, there are certain established writers who I’d always recommend—Dan Chaon, Charles D’Ambrosio, Julie Orringer, and Chang-rae Lee, to name a few.

Further Resources

– In this short interview with One Story, Porter answers questions about his story “Azul,” which first appeared in Issue #72 of the magazine.

– On Random House’s website, read an excerpt from “Hole.”

– Watch/listen to Porter read his short story “Departure”:

- At Largehearted Boy, Porter offers up a playlist for stories from The Theory of Light and Matter.

- Read more about the Hollywood event–featuring readings of Porter’s stories by Matthew Armstrong, Rainn Wilson, Andrew Porter, Justine Bateman, and Nathan Fillion–on the One-Story blog–and see photos from the night here.

– Shopping for a copy of The Theory of Light and Matter? Buy your copy from Powells and support an independent bookstore.

“Whatever you do, stay in the room.” So advises Ron Carlson in his book on the craft of writing, appropriately titled Ron Carlson Writes a Story. He knows what world exists on the other side of the door: a world full of televised sports, dirty dishes, iced mochachinos. A world full of distraction from the task at hand. Writing, he argues, is about staying in the room, pushing beyond the point where your eyes glaze over and your fingers refuse to type. That’s where the magic lies.

The first time I encountered a Ron Carlson book, I was a few weeks into my first real job, trying to convince a bunch of high school students that, Of course, The Old Man and the Sea relates to your experiences. You’ve been alive, what, fifteen years? Isn’t Santiago’s grand struggle against the unstoppable approach of death totally obvious to you? A friend of mine had mentioned Carlson’s name, said I might like his stuff. I was spending my Saturdays at The Boston Public Library in Copley Square, grading papers and roaming the stacks, as if somewhere amidst the million books I would find the answer for what I wanted to do with my life. That’s when I plucked Ron Carlson’s The News of the World from the shelf.

Here, at last, were stories I wanted to tell: a father covers his roof in horse manure in order to sustain the myth of Santa Claus; a man is haunted by the faces of missing children staring out from his milk cartons; a husband (whose wife’s name is Story!) drops a basketball in the middle of a lake, then attempts to swim to it in the dark, an act that recreates a sperm’s journey, a ritual intended to remedy his wife’s infertility. The collection even included a story about Donkey Kong! I knew then that I would continue to teach—I had to pay back some loans. But I would write, too. Ron Carlson had given me permission to tell my stories.

So I was particularly excited when I heard that Carlson would be traveling to Ann Arbor in February to read at the University of Michigan as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series. And I was even more excited to have the opportunity to speak with Carlson during his trip. Like his stories, he has a sly humor that is tempered by his seriousness about the craft of fiction. He speaks like someone you know: your father, your teacher, your coach. He tells jokes, shares advice. At dinner he orders sloppy joes and root beer. He makes you want to stay in the room.

Ron Carlson is the author of four story collections and five novels, including The Signal, which was just released in paperback in June. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. His stories and monologues have been featured on NPR’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. Last year he received the Aspen Prize for Literature, an honor previously bestowed on Salman Rushdie. He now lives near Los Angeles and directs the creative writing program at the University of California – Irvine.

Interview:

You’ve been teaching in one capacity or another for forty years. Do you see yourself more as a teacher or a writer, or have the two become so connected that you don’t really separate them in your head?

They have become inextricable, but I was a writer first. I was a young guy, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five-years-old, who stubbornly taught against the grain. I knew other people who thought that way. You paid the bills with teaching and you wrote, but what happened to me is I went to teach at a prep school. I came out of a big public school in Utah, but I ended up in this all-male prep school in Connecticut [The Hotchkiss School] where I got captured by the men. It was bizarre. I was newly married, twenty-three-years-old, and I ran into these master teachers, these guys who had given their lives over to teaching. It wasn’t like you went home, because you lived at school. It was hard—the preparations were exhausting, and then I had to run a dorm with twenty boys on my floor. Crazy times. I’ll write a novel about that some time.

For example, I couldn’t skate but I ended up coaching the hockey team. We also had Saturday classes. For ten years, I taught grammar to sophomores on Saturday mornings, and I liked it. I became a guy who saw where the leverage was. I was energetic, so I learned how to teach, and I learned how to write underneath it. In my third year, I told the department chair that I quit because I wasn’t writing my book, and he said something ridiculous, he said, “To hell with it, take the spring off, we’ll pay you for the spring, and you don’t have to come back.” He saw the big picture. He said, “You’ve got to be a teacher, but you need to get this out of your system so go.”

So I went to Mexico in March and finished my book [Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald]. I called the school in August and said, “I’m coming back.” I served seven more years and loved it. I wrote my second novel at Hotchkiss, one page at a time. Class ended at 12:40pm, I had hockey practice at 1:30, and I would write in the spaces between. I was a teacher who wrote some books. I was never more alive. I’ve never had two years off to just write. If I hadn’t been a teacher, I’d maybe have four more books. But I would have let all the books go in order to teach.

Going back to those years in the classroom and those boys on Saturday mornings, what literature did you enjoy teaching?

There wasn’t much experimentation. You didn’t bring in anything new. I spent ten years reading and learning to love everything I should have read in college—all the Victorians, all the Romantic poets. It fed me in a way that I couldn’t tell you. We read The Odyssey every year. Moby Dick. Then you bring it up to Death of a Salesman, Gatsby. Winesburg, Ohio was particularly poignant in a prep school setting.

What is it like to reach a point in your career where your own books have become part of some schools’ required reading?

Well, it advances the discussion. Now that people have read my work, it’s a privilege. And it’s always a bit of a surprise because everybody knows more about you than you’re used to.

Supposing that you aren’t the author for a minute, are there any Ron Carlson stories you’d enjoy teaching or sharing with students?

I’m teaching a graduate class this winter called “Forty Stories and One Poem.” That course is oriented on the question “How was that story made?” I’m only interested in how the story was made. Yeah, it bleeds out, and people are going “Wow,” but I say, “Hold the ‘wow.’ I don’t care about the ‘wow.’”  Where does the story start? How does the writer move back? What’s the transition? I’m all nuts and bolts and craft, and I love to share my stories that way. I’d love people to read “Blazo” [from Plan B for the Middle Class] that way or the stories in At the Jim Bridger. I’ve been to a lot of reading groups where people have read my novels, and that’s illuminating. I rarely talk as a writer. I’m always talking as a teacher.

Can you recall a book from your youth that brought you to writing, not necessarily one that made you say, “I want to be a writer,” but “This is the kind of writing I want to do”?

Someone just gave me Robert Stone’s book of stories Fun with Problems, and I read the first paragraph and I put it down and went to write. So Stone, and Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano. That book is uneven, but even at its low points it’s higher than anybody else.

What I try to do as a teacher, and what I loved as a young writer, is seeing what is possible. When I think of my influences, I think of Richard Brautigan. I think of Ionesco. I think of Cheever. There’s something lovely about being brutally sincere. Simple honesty. Hemingway was a powerful influence when I was in college, but you’ve got to be careful when reading Hemingway. You can’t read him too early. You should really hold the Hemingway until you’re twenty-five. There are also parts of Fitzgerald that I read in college that still get me, passages where he lets go: the center sections of his story “May Day” and  “The Sensible Thing.” That’s where I began to see the viable connection between language and emotion.

In terms of your own writing, you’ve said that the key to success is “surviving the draft,” a process you’ve equated to a refusal to drown. Do you have any tips for those of us out there in the water?

They say that teaching creative writing is a series of offering tips, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think the way forward is always remembering why you wanted it, why you wanted to write. You’ve also got to marry yourself to subjects that have your total attention. That’s so easy to say. It’s like saying, “Find the right person to marry.” But success lies in this 100 percent commitment, even when the writing feels comical or odd. Your desire allows you to stay with the project, allows you to stay in the dark, to survive in the dark. If you’re always in the light when you’re writing a story, it’s probably not a story I’d care to read. One of the reasons we continue this very delicious mystery of talking about creative writing is that you can’t learn about the dark by turning on the lights. Everybody has to go off into the dark. And the reason we’re doing it is not for glory, but for our love of our material. That’s the cornerstone.

You’ve described the stories in your first collection, The News of the World, published in 1989, as “wishful,” and you’ve said that when writing them your imagination “took a sunny turn.” About ten years after that book’s publication, you gave an interview in which you said, “I’m a nice guy, but that’s an impulse I’m slowly conquering.” How is that working out for you?

What you want as a writer is to earn your turns, to earn all the changes. Even when I was in my “sunny” stage, there’s a lot of rube in my stories. If you write a lot, you’ll see that you weren’t even aware that you were writing about the person you would become or the person you had been. A writer has to play with a full deck. You can’t just play with the face cards. You have to reach. A writer’s progress isn’t linear. You don’t go two, four, six, eight. Now I think there’s a clear light and a clear shadow in my work. That’s what you want. Readers are smart, and they want to be taken seriously. They don’t want a gratuitous nod at the good and the bad. I’ve never tried to do that. So-called “happy endings” are very difficult. I don’t even know what a happy ending is. But a dark ending can also be facile in a literary sense. You know, “Cheryl would never be the same again.”  Really? I’m not so sure.

The best writing is recording. We begin with what we know, and we move toward what we don’t. I think that’s fiction’s role. The life I’ve led wants me to be an optimist, but that’s my life. It doesn’t mean I can turn the music up at the ending of every story. I know about craft choices. I know how stories function. What we’re looking for at all times is honesty presented in language so that we can see the world again. Can you surprise me again with something I already know? It’s more important to be real than nice or bad.

You spent a lot of time in your four story collections writing about domestic life: families, husbands, wives, suburbia. Your last two novels in many ways are books without roofs. In other words, they’re stories that take place almost exclusively outdoors with people sleeping in tents, under the stars. Why do you think you’ve gone in this direction as a writer?

I don’t know. I wanted to write a book about work, and that’s Five Skies. I did some temporary work at a fair once where we put up seating and took it down and put up fences and took them down. It was bizarre. So I wrote a page of dialogue, and I’d been reading Rick Bass, and one character asks another, “Did you ever make anything that lasted?” And then I wrote a section about a truck sliding through a snow fence, and it was visceral. I could feel that. About halfway through I saw the real arc of the story, and I freaked out. I called my editor and said, “You’ve got to understand, this book, there aren’t any women in it, and it’s all out of doors, and it’s in the West, and it’s about work. It’s not going to fit.” And he said, “Go. Go nuts.” So I wrote the book, and I was very happy with its reception.

In fact, last year, Five Skies followed best-selling novels such as The Kite Runner and The Secret Life of Bees as the “state book” for the Read Across Rhode Island program. How were you involved in the events surrounding this program?

First of all, those people are the sweetest people of all time. Whenever you go somewhere and meet readers in a room, those are special people. I went to Rhode Island twice for events and it was a dream. We had so much fun. At one of the colleges they had a lecture, and somebody analyzed the book, and somebody cooked all the food from the book, and they acted out a chapter. They were nuts. Then I went to a breakfast later in the year—maybe five hundred people—and some of my old students were there. One guy was in his fifties, he’s a surgeon, and he had skated for me at Hotchkiss.

Does it help with your future projects to think back on the anxiety you felt while writing Five Skies now that it has been so well received?

Yes. That’s why it’s better to remember that you’re only as good as your thinking. In the current world with all the noise, the Internet, and so on, it can be problematic for writers. A lot of things want to divide you. People should talk about that more. A writer can’t multi-task. Multi-tasking is like saying, “I quit.” It’s a phrase people use to explain why they’re doing two things poorly. Both of my last books were received well and got some recognition, but that has nothing to do with what’s next. It’s like flipping a coin. You can stare at that tails for an hour, and it won’t affect what happens next. I’m trying to stay calm about the book I’m writing now because it’s kind of flat, but that’s going to be the way it is. There’s nothing particularly sexy about this next book and that’s OK.

That’s interesting because a lot of people reacted to The Signal by labeling it a thriller. Do you see the book that way or is that description too limiting?

It’s very difficult. I have trouble saying what a book is. I say The Signal is a backpacking book, and that’s good for me. I made a decision while writing The Signal that I was going to add some voltage, so I put in some higher profile plot points. It was a really interesting decision when I realized there’d be firearms. I didn’t want it to just be two characters in the woods. I wanted other issues, so I used what I know about writing to make the rest of it have a purchase in credibility. So, yeah, I pumped it up at the end. If it was my only book ever, I might not have done that. But then I thought, “Come on, you’re going to write more books, so let’s put it in.” There was something fun about it. When you tie a knot like that, and then untie it, it’s a kind of pleasure.

Let me throw a Ron Carlson quote at you as a way to address your writing process. You said, “I’m not going to wait for eight months of free time to write a great big book. That would be like a snake eating a pig. I want to nibble. I want to eat every day.” Still nibbling?

Absolutely. On the best days, I can get ninety minutes or 700 words. You use whatever ritual you can find. You push. I’ve written some stories five sentences a day for a hundred days. A lot of days I’d stop in the middle of a word. I’d know how to pick up, because I knew how to spell. But during my busiest times at school, I have to keep myself alive with blips, maybe only two days a week. Ultimately, the goal is to be working more days of the week than not.

I’d like to ask about the ways that your love of movies has influenced or hovered in the background of much of your writing. A number of your characters are connected to Hollywood in some way, either as professionals or as movie-lovers, and several of your works include epigraphs that are from films. What kinds of movies interest you, and how has your appreciation for on-screen stories affected your writing?

In my formative years, movies were something you saw rarely. You saw them once, or if they were on TV, you made sure to watch. I loved horror movies and all the old science fiction. It was the 1950s, so we had It Came From Beneath the Sea, and all that stuff got me. It still does, because that’s what I rent on Netflix. It’s pathetic. Someone will come over and I’ll say, “You want to see the octopus that attacked San Francisco?”

Really, all culture has affected my writing. Songs, stories, especially ballads, Western ballads. I grew up in a time when we had a monolithic culture. We all had the same twenty references in television, in movies, in song. And now there’s such a multiplicity, such huge diversity.

In a long-ago interview you mentioned that you were working on a screenplay for your story “Life Before Science.” Then, in 2008, your story “Keith” was made into a movie. Many readers have also suggested that Five Skies and The Signal would translate well to the screen. Do you see more Hollywood in your future?

All my work is under option, and I wish them the best, but I’m not following it. There’s one piece I have that I’d like to write the screenplay: my story “Beanball.”  I did write a screenplay for my novel The Speed of Light and there are inquiries about that every few years. Really, film is just a windfall. When someone buys the rights to your book, you’ve got to let go. My plate’s full with teaching. If I was worried about money, I might go scrambling, but I’ve been blessed not to do that. I never had to write anything for money because I had a job and that allowed me to write crazily. I had to write and not let my students know what I was writing. And I’ve been lucky. I’ve published just about everything I ever wrote. So, no, I don’t plan on doing anything in particular for the movies. I would much rather spend the day at my house having a pot of coffee, having gotten in my six hundred words. Maybe go to the post office on my bike, call a friend, write for a bonus hour. That really is the center of my life.

Further Links and Resources:

• Read Ron Carlson’s story “At Copper View,” which was originally published in Five Points Vol. V, No. 1. This story was collected in At the Jim Bridger. It was also one of fifty stories short-listed for a 2001 O. Henry Prize.
• You can also read Carlson’s introduction to the Fall 2006 issue of Ploughshares, in which he discusses what makes a good story.
• Here is a 2009 interview with Carlson from the New West website where he discusses his new novel, The Signal.
• Listen to an audio version of Carlson’s Christmas story “The H Street Sledding Record.”
• Ron Carlson describes teaching as “an act of investigation,” much like the process of writing itself, in this brief clip about teaching in the UC-Irvine writing program:
• Here is an interview with Ron Carlson from UC-Irvine’s 2009 Literary Orange Festival:
• Watch The Gold Lunch, a short film by Joanna Kerns adapted from Ron Carlson’s story:

It’s a lesson this young writer’s lavish prose could benefit from, resonating as deeply with me as it does the novel’s protagonist when Kestin, a war-zone wordsmith, channels his unique perspective on “economy” through Shushan “Shoeshine” Cats, the Jewish gangster who takes Iron Will’s hero, Russell Newhouse, under his wing in 1963-era Brooklyn. Shushan sums up much more than Kestin’s past when he tells Russ,

“A general and a poet are exactly the same in one thing. What they do they have to do with critical efficiency. Not a word or an action wasted. And the action has to be more important than the man who creates it.”

This is as much a mission statement for how Iron Will is composed as to how Russ goes about solving the novel’s many crises. Kestin’s journalistic imprint paces the plot into a fluid regiment of short chapters jam-packed with reveals and introductions, all of which—and I mean this, because I actually charted out the turns, ten pages of hand-written notes because the story’s connectedness surprised the hell out of me—come full circle to impact not just Russ or Shushan’s fate, but every character’s and the city that contains them. It’s a no-nonsense approach to storytelling and the joy lies in discovering just how every word and action goes un-wasted. And in the end, Shushan is spot-on: the action that unfolds is indeed more important than the men who create it.

Or, as Kestin might say, the man who wrote it. In a 2009 reading with Dick Heffner, host of public television’s “Open Mind,”Kestin admitted this to his New York City audience: “I’m very often asked, what’s the book about? And I never know what to say because if I could say it in twelve words, I would not have spent 120,000 and a year and a half of my life trying to tell the story.”

Like Shushan, Kestin grew up in the Brooklyn of the 1950s and ‘60s. He knows the time period, and as a Jew, understands how it affected his people. More importantly, he knows how crime—organized, and, as Shushan puts it, “disorganized”—shaped the borough and its residents. The impregnation of Kestin’s past into Iron Will illuminates the author’s comments in a column for The Millions in which the author decried the state of new fiction, saying the following:

“Most new writing suffers from what can only be called peanuts envy, a wish to emulate the classic New Yorker story about uninteresting people with irritating little problems doing little or nothing about them but bumping into similarly boring people doing, if possible, less – and all of it slowly.”

Kestin’s Iron Will is a response to the shortcomings he describes above, stories he has punished physically, admitting, “For years I’ve had the extreme displeasure of throwing new fiction across the room. Launched just right, the spine splits and…pages shake out like, well, bad fiction: unconnected, insubstantial, rank.” Kestin attacks the shortcomings of boring, uninteresting characters by creating the opposite: connected in surprising ways and engaged in action constantly, Iron Will’s cast becomes more than simply colorful, it develops depth. By populating his story with gangsters and bookies from seemingly every New York City neighborhood, with strong-men, crooked cops and even JFK, some detractors of new fiction might think Kestin exchanges one problem for another—by attempting to write work that moves beyond character, he loses character. But that is not the case here. Beyond their looks or lines of work or historical significance, these characters are interesting because of their motivations, as devoted to one another as to a set of ideals or simply the ideal of survival. None of these characters has what can be called a little problem, and, as such, they go about solving them with incredible gusto, all of it developing fast and furious. Kestin has, in ways, written his first novel the only way he could: he has written something he would want to read.

Map of Brooklyn's Neighborhoods / image by Peter Fitzgerald from Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps this is because the story in Iron Will is one Kestin himself wishes he could have experienced. For me, a new writer torn between industry expectations of success—to say nothing of family, friends and self—and my own unique need to simply express, this realization was liberating. The setting, characters, and plot—bricks that instead of forming foundation so often weigh upon a young writer’s sense of story, the result of which is a deflating heaviness that I sometimes call duty but you might know better as a reader’s expectation—are developed in Iron Will with “critical efficiency,” an exacting journalistic authenticity. But Kestin’s reliance on the tools of his trade does not make his work laborious. While we cannot know for sure if the writing was fun, if it was a joy to immerse himself in this world, we can say with some certainty that Kestin wrote the only way he could: by being himself. And it is this authenticity in the work that makes it a joy for readers to immerse themselves.

Likewise, the intersection of the “real” and the “imagined”—what Kestin has lived versus what could have been lived—shines on every page of the novel, including its cover; Kestin is, after all, the face readers see on its front. This overlap of reality and fiction gives the novel the multi-layered feeling of a palimpsest. When asked to reflect on his creation at the aforementioned reading, Kestin said:

“All I know is that when I finished writing the book, I realized that the child, twenty years old, in question, was me. But the story, of course, had never happened. And I finished half a bottle of whiskey after that. Because I realized that although I had gotten into trouble at twenty, and eighteen, and sixteen, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, I had never gotten into this kind of trouble. And I wondered if I had been man enough to handle it the way this young man did. To this day I’m not sure.”

The “trouble” Kestin alludes to is in continuous evolution during the course of Iron Will’s forty-seven chapters—every new character introduction and subsequent re-entrance brings with it some fresh factoid of Shushan and Russ’s past, a hint at their future, how these things connect. In fact, “trouble” becomes Iron Will’s spine. The turns and twists that occur throughout the book fuse its narrative with milestones built on revelations, every one of them fundamentally shifting the direction and scope of Kestin’s story, a sinfully fun read not just because Kestin is a master storyteller from his journalistic days, or because he knows Brooklyn from his childhood, but because his characters are fun and flawed, and allowed to show us why.

Take, for example, the novel’s namesake, Shushan “Shoeshine” Cats. A fearsome gangster despite his diminutive 5’7” stature, a man who might “…gain weight on a diet of grubs and water,” Shushan is more than just a thug, he is a thinker. Routinely quoting La Rochefoucauld to cops and musing on the seventeen accents and dialects in Huckleberry Finn reveals him as a man as self-educated in literature and art as trained with a rifle and fists.

The Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn / photo credit Jeffrey O. Gustafson from Wikimedia Commons

Now, in a world post Tony Soprano, the gangster in touch with his feelings might not appear particularly original. Yet Kestin ensures Shushan isn’t too good to be true—a rabbi with a rap sheet—by making him painfully dogmatic on nearly every stance and subject. For a shortish man of Jewish heritage like myself, this ensures Shushan remains memorable without becoming a role-model. You come to respect the man for his black-and-white thinking, but fear him for the blood red that might come for foraying into the wrong. Shushan’s traits may be best encapsulated by his mother, a character we never meet but whose impact is clear when Shushan explains that it is she who taught him that if he is punched, he must punch back ten times. And in a perfect example of the duality of this character, he crafts a beautiful eulogy after her death, but insists that Russ read the speech because he can’t let people see him cry. After all, that would be bad for business.

Literature, poetry and music compete with gangster business-theory as constant forces in Iron Will, explored as often through Russ and his English professor as Shushan himself. These discourses on art and law and racism aren’t written to portray Shushan to the reader as some new evolution of gangster; rather, they illustrate how Shoeshine’s intelligence is as important to why he is revered and respected as to why he is feared. We end up believing in Shushan because he tells us what he believes in; because those beliefs, built as solidly as his physique, are allowed to be wrong, contradictory, flawed. Russ’s intimacy with the gangster gives us a unique vantage point. We come to understand how a man can become as committed to charity as crime, and how this makes that man human.

Language itself is a central seductive force in Iron Will. While on the surface drawing lines in the Brooklyn Babel-like war for turf—American streets fought over by decedents of China, Puerto Rico, Africa, and, of course, it being a book about crime, Italy—it is also one of the main reasons Shushan is able to seduce Russ, a devotee to reading and literature, into apprenticeship. The two bond over words and from there on, even when Shushan is absent, literature factors in how Russ solves problems and perceives the events around him in spite of the fact that he believes those old written worlds are no longer part of him:

…books, which had been all, were now merely a pleasant memory, a backdrop, a frame of reference. My adventures in literature could not hold a candle to my adventures in Little Italy, in Chinatown, at the Westbury. Whether purposely or not, I had to read to experience the world through the eyes of others. I was now experiencing it through my own, to say nothing of the other parts of my anatomy.

In the end, Iron Will isn’t about denial, it’s about confrontation. The confrontation of a Jewish people against the hardships they faced in World War II—“In melting-pot America [Jews] were heat-resistant, tempered by several thousand years of being close to, if not in, history’s fires”—just as it is about the confrontation and hardships that Black communities were enduring in Alabama—”‘I’m calling on you to do something about what’s happening to your people…Let me put it to you straight, Mr. Royce. Either you march for your people or you march against them.’” It’s about the confrontation of Russ against his sexaholic past, his orphan present, his open-book future. It’s about the confrontation of law men and criminals, gangster and gangsters, the right way of doing business and the wrong way of doing business. In the end, Iron Will becomes not simply a confrontation of a boy against his past and future, but a borough and country’s:

The ethos of the time was this: our failure—a nation’s, a group’s, an individual’s—was rooted in our own weakness or greed or lust or love or even in our genes. We could not blame someone else: we were our own enemy.

And yet, for such a perfectly tailored story, Iron Will sometimes veers toward too perfect. After all, there is something beautiful about a loose knot, and Kestin, who does such a fine job tying together his characters and twists, may leave some readers almost melancholy that their futures end so buttoned up. Still, if this book’s single flaw is that it it’s almost flawless structurally…well, let’s just say that’s a problem I’d happily embrace in my own work. Consider the multitudes of stories written about gangsters and it’s fair to say the world of new fiction is lucky to count Kestin in its ranks. Here is a writer who knows how to follow his own advice, to write work that matters, and to craft it not in floral prose but literary iron—forty-seven jabs, not a word or action wasted.

Further Links and Reading:

• If you’d like to purchase a copy of The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, now is the perfect time to do it because Dzanc Books is having a huge summer book sale. From now until July 9th you’ll get half-off their titles plus free shipping. Help support this great non-profit by taking advantage of this equally great deal.

• To read a selection from Kestin’s novel, here is an excerpt from The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, published in The Collagist.
• You can also read about how Kestin came to writing in a brief piece he wrote for the Three Guys, One Book blog in their “When We Fell in Love” section, entitled “Books–and Walks–that Made me a Writer.”
• Other authors who’ve recently written on this topic for the “When We Fell in Love” series on Three Guys, One Book include Eric Puchner (Music Through the Floor) , Elwood Reid (DB), Tom Rachman (The Imperfectionists), and Leslie Jamison (The Gin Closet).
• Kestin is also the author of Based on a True Story, a collection of novellas. Here is a description of the book from the publisher: “Set on the eve of WWII in an erotically charged Africa, an intensely un-Gauguinesque Polynesia, and a Hollywood of explosive racial and gender identities, the three novella that make up Based on a True Story reveal the roots of contemporary life in a world at war with itself.” This book was published by Dzanc in 2008.

Having heard the dog’s call, it seemed like I couldn’t find a book without one. Not The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Not Shadow Country. Not Ulysses. Not Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, or Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue, or Stephen King’s It or Christine. Not Jodi Picoult’s House Rules. If novelists share anything, it’s a distant-dog impulse. Picture an author at work: She’s exhausted, gazing at her laptop and dreaming about lunch. “[Author typing.] Boyd slammed the car door shut. He stared at his new condominium, with the for-sale sign in the yard. He picked up a pistol and pointed it at his head. [Author thinking, Now what? Gotta buy time.] Somewhere a dog barked. [Author thinking, Hmm, that'll do.] Then Boyd remembered he did qualify for the tax rebate for first-time home buyers, and put down the gun.” If a novel is an archeological record of 4.54 billion decisions, then maybe distant barking dogs are its fossils, evidence of the novelist working out an idea.

Think you’re immune? Search your own publications or drafts and report back. I love to think of Baldwin on this search–I hope he spent an engrossing Sunday afternoon pulling book after book from the shelf and leafing through them until he found the culprit dog in each one. And if dogs barking are the novelist pausing for thought, what of that sneakier (and smarter) but quieter familiar, the cat?

photo credit: Philip Chaon

Reading Dan Chaon’s latest novel, Await Your Reply, we may not trust the identity-shifting protagonists as they flee and reconstruct new selves, but we always trust Chaon to guide us through the mysteries of who these characters will become. The book maintains its humor and humanity despite severed limbs, questionable mental health, Russian mobsters, and Psycho-like accommodations. Chaon’s work has always shown a fascination with what he used to call, in workshops at Oberlin College (where I had the good fortune of being his student), the “spooky” side of life: ghosts and unanswered questions, disappearances and visions, but also the stranger echoes of our own human chambers and relationships. While his stories often hinge on the morbid and unusual, readers don’t have to work hard to suspend disbelief; ultimately, Chaon’s work doesn’t strive to show us the freakishness of his characters’ worlds, but the familiarity of them.

Await Your Reply has been named one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Salon.com, and the American Library Association, among others. Chaon is also the author of the novel You Remind Me of Me, which was nominated for a National Book Award, and the story collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing. He is a beloved teacher at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

This interview was conducted over email in March and April of 2010.

Interview

DANIELLE LAZARIN: Await Your Reply hinges on lots of small mysteries, which slowly get solved, but which also often open up into larger mysteries. The book has a lot of resolution, and the reader feels very sated, and yet you still, in typical Chaon style, leave plenty of questions for the reader to answer on their own. You seem more comfortable than a lot of writers with the unknown; I’m thinking in particular here, of the endings of the title stories of your collections Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, both of which refuse to answer mysteries that the characters themselves cannot solve. 
How did you, as a writer, become comfortable with leaving questions unanswered in your stories?

DAN CHAON: My fascination with unanswered questions started early on. As a kid, I loved ghost stories, unsolved mysteries, unexplained phenomenon. I also had a soft spot for the boy detective genre of children’s fiction—Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators, etc.—but I always felt disappointed by the resolution. One of the first pieces of fiction I wrote was a series of stories about a boy who investigated mysterious events which could never be solved. This was when I was about ten or eleven, and already I felt this weird resistance to the concept of closure.

Later, when I was in college, I remember being drawn to the famous Freud essay “The Uncanny,” in which he talks about the concept of unheimlich. His general thesis is that the uncanny is anything we experience in adulthood that reminds us of earlier psychic stages, aspects of our unconscious life, the primitive experience of the human species, etc. Those moments when we draw close to a feeling of helpless unknowing, when we sense secrets that won’t reveal themselves, the way we do in early childhood.

For some reason, this reminded me of discussions we were having in my English class about “epiphany,” —I was taking a Joyce class at the time—and there was this essay by Robert Scholes, “Epiphanies and Epicleti” which is contained in the Viking Critical Library edition of Dubliners. Scholes calls an “epiphany” “a moment in which things or people in the world revealed their true character or their essence.” In Stephen Hero, Joyce calls the moment of epiphany “a sudden spiritual manifestation.”

In any case, it’s not an idea that Joyce can take full credit for. In Greek drama “epiphany” refers to the moment when a god appears and imposes order on the scene before him. I suppose you could say that. In any case, the idea of epiphany has a lot to do with the notion of seeing and not seeing; or as they sing in “Amazing Grace,” I once was blind, but now I see.

In more contemporary fiction, that idea of epiphany, moment of being, “imposed order,” etc. is often based on metaphorical connections between “secular” moments/objects and “spiritual” insight. A few famous examples might be the wonderfully rococo description of Jazz music at the end of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”; or, much simpler and more understated, the drawing of the cathedral in Carver’s “Cathedral” and the single paragraph, which I still find incredibly moving:

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.

The term epiclitus also comes from the Greek, and according to Scholes, it means, “summoned before a court,” or “accused.” Scholes says: “Thus, the epicleti may be considered the accused, summoned up by Joyce to stand trial as specimens of Irish paralysis.” In other words, Scholes says, an epiclitus is an moment in which a character fails to have a revelation, is left trapped, unable to change or escape from the mundane world. Note, that there’s almost always a sense of indictment to this kind of ending: social—spiritual—existential failure.

So almost all of Beckett’s work leads toward this end, and the absurdists, and Blanche Dubois’s “depending on the kindness of strangers,” and some of Cheever’s darker stuff, like “The Swimmer.” (Some would argue that the end of “The Country Husband” is a clueless, epiclitus ending narrated as if it’s an epiphany…)

Katherine Mansfield

Anyway, I’ve often thought that “epiclitus” doesn’t necessarily have to be an indictment. One of the cleanest examples of epiclitus in 20th-century short stories is Katherine Mansfield’s wonderful, “Daughters of the Late Colonel,” and it’s also very moving and beautiful. Here’s a moment in which the two spinster sisters edge close to a moment of insight:

“It was only when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a thunderstorm that she really felt herself. What did it mean? What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to? Now? Now? She turned away from the Buddha with one of her vague gestures. She went over to where Josephine was standing. She wanted to say something to Josephine, something frightfully important–about the future and what…”

But then it’s gone before she can grasp it, and the story ends with this exchange:

“I can’t say what I was going to say, because I’ve forgotten what it was…that I was going to say.”

Josephine was silent for a moment. She stared at a big cloud where the sun had been. Then she replied shortly, “I’ve forgotten too.”

Anyway, basically the two terms are flipsides of the same idea–the notion that there is some state of revelation, insight into mystery, moment of being, or what-have-you which is either grasped (epiphany) or lost (epiclitus). We (the readers) often pity or feel slightly superior to those who don’t get their epiphanies. It’s frequently presented ironically.

And yet…as for me, I guess I’ve always felt personally and emotionally closer to the searchers, rather than to the finders…to those who don’t get answers, as opposed to those who do. For me, the experience of epiclitus is closely related to the experience of the uncanny, but also to the experience of complex and problematic emotions, like yearning, and awe, and psychic unease, which are of particular interest to me. That precipice of endless uncertainty, of the impenetrable—those are the moments that I’ve always loved in literature, as well as the moments that have haunted me in life.

I’ve read and heard many times over that McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, in which your story, “The Bees,” appeared in 2003, ushered in a new era of genre-bending in “literary” fiction. Do you think it’s at all true that books like Kelly Link’s story collections, or Lauren Groff’s Monsters of Templeton, for example, might not have fared as well say 10 or 15 years ago? Do you think the reading public’s openness and acceptance to a more fantastic kind of story within the literary really began in the past decade or so?

Not exactly. I think there was a certain period of American Literature—maybe about fifty years, 1950-2000, let’s say—where “realism” and “literary” were more or less synonymous, and that had to do with the rise of genre as a commercial category as much as anything. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of our canonized writers had no qualms about working with the fantastic—from Hawthorne and Poe to James and Wharton—and my sense is that a lot of the prejudice against fantasy, horror, etc. started with the New Critics in the 30’s and 40’s. There’s probably a long essay in that, which I won’t write.

If there has been a change, a lot of it, I think, was borne of frustration and boredom. By the mid-1990’s, the domestic mode was starting to feel like a prison to a lot of younger writers I knew. Many of us had grown up during the heyday of commercial SF and Horror in the 1970s, and that was what we read as kids. Personally, I started out as a straight-up horror writer, and it was only when my creative writing teachers told me that they didn’t accept “genre fiction” that I began to work in a more realist mode. I would say that the restrictions were good for me, and that I really needed to broaden my emotional range and explore character more fully. At the same time, I think that a lot of the creative energy and impetus in my work comes from the fantastic, the supernatural, etc. I think there’s a little glimmer of it even in my most realistic pieces—and when it’s not there, the piece doesn’t feel as alive to me. But I also don’t think I’m exactly in the New Fabulist mode, either. I’m sort of caught in-between.

But anyway, it’s hard to make sweeping statements about literary culture. Whether we’re in a new era, I don’t know. 
 


The novel is told through three characters’ points of view: Lucy, a small town girl who’s run off with her high school history teacher, George Orson; Ryan, who’s recently reunited with his biological father; and Miles, who is searching for his less-than-stable twin brother, Hayden. Each of these stories get equal weight and time in the book; was it always this way? Did you always envision the novel as having three narratives you were setting on a collision course?

Yes. It actually started as three separate short stories, which I was working on while I was waiting for a different (unfinished, moribund) novel to figure itself out. I kept toying around with these three narratives, and I had the instinct that they were connected in some way, but I didn’t know how. 
 


How did this work for you as you were writing? Did you work towards the mystery solved, or walk into it and hope to find an answer? The collision course you set these characters on: holy moley. We know it’s inevitable, although how the characters will collide is, as we all as writers strive for, also pretty surprising. I am hard-pressed to talk about how many delicious turns and progress the book makes without giving anything away.

The first draft of the book was really a process of figuring out what the connections were…and it was exciting to write because things kept surprising me as the three stories developed. Of course, it was also scary because there were times when I painted myself into a corner, and I didn’t know how to get out. I honestly didn’t know how the book was going to come together until the last hundred pages, though I knew from the beginning that the opening chapter and the closing chapter would happen on the same night.

I tend to think in terms of very abstract structural elements. Each chapter is a kind of building block, or episode, and I know it has to move the plot forward. But I can’t write plot until I get to know the characters, until understand why they do what they do. With this kind of novel, that was a very reckless method of writing, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my fantastic editor, Anika Streitfeld, who read through the book as it was being written, chapter by chapter; and my wife, Sheila, who talked me through the book’s movements and managed to get me out of a number of dead ends. The big plot reveal in the last chapter was actually her idea.

Is there a method of writing for you that doesn’t feel reckless?

I don’t know. I always feel like other writers must have things figured out better than I do…they have outlines, they know what’s going to happen to their characters, maybe they draw diagrams. It worries me a little, now that I’m starting work on a new novel, that I never actually know what I’m doing. Eventually, I’m going to stop getting lucky and it’s all going to end in tears.

I love that Miles and Hayden are twins. There’s something delectably creepy about twins (see The Shining, for starters) and so full of literary potential for doubling and contrast. Was this a conscious decision from the start: did they start off as brothers, or perhaps one character to start?

I knew that they’d be twins from the beginning, and in fact that was one of the first things I knew about the book. I’ve always been fascinated by twins. When I was a kid, growing up in rural Nebraska, I was the only kid in my grade at school, and I felt like a freak compared to the other children, so I used to imagine that it would be great to have a twin, someone who I could relate to. I was also really interested in playing on the uncanny, creepy aspects of twins—the doppelganger stuff, the stuff about split-personalities and psychic connections–a whole body of iconic, suggestive memes that have been around for a long time that seemed like it would be fun to dig into.

I took many of your classes when I was an undergrad at Oberlin. As many as I could. In fact, I believe I was told by the department chair that I could not “major in Dan Chaon.” I know I’m not alone in being a devotee of your classes. (Are you blushing yet?) Can you talk a little about your identity as a teacher—and a much-stalked one to boot—and if, and how, this differs from your identity as a writer? How do you manage to reserve energy for your own work while teaching? Do you feel like you draw on different resources as a teacher than you do as a writer?

I feel like teaching makes me a better writer. I’m lucky, because my students at Oberlin are so smart, so talented, and so mature—I don’t really feel like they’re kids so much as people who share the same passion, and we’re in a lot of ways on the same journey. We’re all asking the same questions, none of which have a single, easy answer: how do you write a good, compelling scene? What makes a character come alive for a reader? What makes a sentence beautiful? These are questions that I struggle with all the time, just the like my students do, so it’s not like I’m really on a different level. I’ve just being doing it longer.

It is hard to teach and write, of course. A big problem is that a lot of times I’m more interested in my students’ work than I am in my own. But at the same time, I feel like I’m always learning and getting ideas when I talk with students. Talking through a student’s problem can often help me articulate something that will apply to my own work, and so there’s a give-and-take that proves to be valuable for me as a writer.

Await Your Reply, deservedly so, made a good number of end-of-the-year best of lists. I know you’re a voracious reader. What books did you love in the past year?

I used to put out a list of my favorite books every year for my students, and that was fun. I read a lot of contemporary fiction. I’ve gotten away from making lists, though, in the past few years. Partially, that was because I got to know a lot more writers, and I started to feel weird about ranking them, or leaving friends off my top 20, or whatever. A few years ago, one of my year-end lists (which I thought of as a private gift to my students) made its way onto the internet, and a couple of my friends had their feelings hurt by it. So I’ve gotten wary of this kind of public declaration. I don’t generally do reviews, for the same reason. Maybe that seems cowardly, or too politic.

But, anyway: here are some of the books that I read and enjoyed in 2009, not in order and not inclusive of all the books I loved: Lynda Barry, What It Is; Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper; Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage; Ron Currie, Jr., Everything Matters; Amy Gerstler, Dearest Creature; Terrence Holt, In The Valley of the Kings; Victor Lavalle, Big Machine; Nami Mun, Miles From Nowhere; Sheila Schwartz, Lies Will Take You Somewhere; Jean Thompson, Do Not Deny Me; Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

How “pure” is your process—you sent me a playlist for the novel—do you listen to music while you write? Do you read other books? Talk about the a book or story’s progress with friends or family?

My process isn’t pure at all. In fact, it’s very dirty. I feel like my books are very patched together, and collage-y, and I’m always bringing elements of other works to bear on my own work. I do listen to music almost constantly—I make playlists that are supposed to get me in the right mood for writing about particular characters, and I read constantly while writing. I also watch TV and read comics, which is frequently a big influence, especially on plot, since I love serial structure.

There are a very few people I actually show my work to while it’s in progress, but I talk about aspects of the story to a great number of people. Sometimes I make up an alternate version of the book I’m writing, because that’s somehow easier and more useful to talk about. In any case, a book exists for me in so many different versions that it’s a long, long time before I have any idea what the final form will look like. 
 


Do you think of your characters as having certain taste in music, or is it music that you think is evocative of them to you?

Most of my characters don’t have very good taste in music. At least, they don’t share my taste in music.

Instead, the music I listen to is often a jumping off point for getting into a mood for a particular character or scene. The idea for Chapter 7, for example, came directly from a beautiful sad song by Josh Rouse called “Michigan,” which starts out “Dear Mom and Dad/I’m living in Michigan with Uncle Ray…” As I listened to the song, I began to get a sense of Ryan, driving through those woods, on his way to the cabin, and I had him writing a letter in his head to his parents which he would never send.

Another song, “My First Soul” by a band called Auld Lang Syne was absolutely essential to me when I was writing the last chapter—through it, I came to discover Hayden’s humanity, his sadness. It’s the song that I’d want to play over the closing credits of a movie of the book.

There is familiar geography in this book—your native Nebraska, and the Midwest, in particular—but also much farther reaches that we’re accustomed to in your fictions: Las Vegas, and the Artic Circle, for starters. Were these places you visited, to envision your characters inhabiting?

Some of the places are quite familiar to me—Cleveland, where I now live; and Lake McConaughy in Nebraska, where I spent childhood vacations. Other places, like Las Vegas and Ecuador, I visited; and still others, like Inuvik, NWT and Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, I only researched—through books and travel brochures and online, via YouTube videos. I chose places that would have the quality of stage-sets, because that was the mood that I wanted to create. 


You’re a somewhat recent user of both Twitter and Facebook. Do you consider these professional or personal accounts (in 2010, is there a difference)? How has that more public presence affected your persona as a writer? Did you read, for instance, Ben Yagoda’s essay in the NYT Book Review about replying to fan e-mail, etc.?

Well, it’s different for novelists than it is for non-fiction people like Yagoda. I don’t get that many emails, and I always answer them. I don’t think I’ve done that much to cultivate a “public presence.” I do occasionally use Twitter and Facebook to notify people when I have a reading or something, but mostly I just post links to stupid things that I find funny or interesting. I don’t generally tell people what I’m eating, or where I’m at, or what I’m experiencing emotionally at any given time. I haven’t put much energy into developing a compelling persona for my Internet Self. 
 


Await Your Reply strikes me as so contemporary without ever really making dated references; it addresses the age we’re in: of identity theft and turnover, of rapid and far-reaching communication. And yet there are great throwbacks, a sense of nostalgia running through the book as well: a dried-up lake and ghost town in Nebraska; a hypnotist named Mr. Breeze, ancient civilizations, Hayden’s past lives, etc… Can you talk about these juxtapositions and how you see these worlds overlapping?

The contemporary aspect of the book wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind when I first started writing. I started out wanting to work with pastiche, to draw on iconic gothic and dark fantasy imagery—spooky, post-apocalyptic landscapes, carnivals and mysterious ruins and roadside attractions; tropes from Hitchcock and Lovecraft and Bradbury and DuMaurier and Shirley Jackson; imagery from House of Mystery comics and bad dreams. I wanted to use all the clutter that haunted and fascinated me, and put it to work.

But at the same time, I wanted to put all this stuff in a contemporary, realistic setting, with everyday characters. I did do some research about identity theft, and hackers and trolls, and this wasn’t that hard since I spend a lot of time on the internet anyway. But most of that stuff wasn’t a big driving force. The heart of the realistic part of the book was the fact that I was raising teenage boys, and I was remembering a lot about what it felt like to be a teenager. Ryan and Lucy are sort of an amalgamation of my experience and the experiences my sons and their friends were going through; and even Miles and Hayden are sort of manchildren, stuck in adolescence, which I think is the real theme of the book.

I’ve always admired the way you don’t idealize children, or parent-child relationships; in fact, many of your youngest characters are at turns realistically creepy and flawed and not sickeningly precocious. I’m thinking of “The Bees,” or “Big Me,” and of course, Await Your Reply, where your portrait of young Hayden is neither cuddly nor average. How does raising sons change the way you write? I mean this on a practical level, as you raised your children with another writer and teacher, but also the way it changed your point of view. Did it become harder for you to write children and the parent-child relationship when you had them yourself?

I did a panel at the Associated Writing Program Conference this year about writing from a child’s point of view, and someone noted that students, at 18, 19, 20, are so close to childhood that they ought to be able to write about it vividly. But I disagreed. I think we are never further from childhood than in those years; and we are never closer to our childhood selves than when we have kids. I don’t write autobiography, but I certainly drew a lot on my experience as a parent, and my observations of my own children, which always drew forth vivid memories—memories I wouldn’t have re-encountered if I hadn’t been a parent.

Now that they’re older, do your boys read your work, and do they recognize some part of themselves or you in it?

It’s funny, because my sons and I frequently read and discuss books together. Most recently, Paul and I both read Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere, because he’s going to be attending Columbia College in Chicago, where Mun teaches. We had a great time talking about it.

But we have never talked much about my work. I know they have read some of my stuff, and they’ve mentioned aspects that they liked. I know, for example, that both of them really enjoyed “The Bees.” But we haven’t delved very far beyond that. There would definitely be details, large and small, that they’d recognize from real life in the books—particularly Await Your Reply—but they haven’t asked about it.

What’s in the pipeline? Stories? More novels?

I have another novel that I’m working on, which I’m under contract for. After that, I think I’d like to finish a collection of stories I’ve been working on for a while. I’m also playing around with screenplays and maybe a television pilot.

Does the “dirty” process you described earlier apply to projects as well? Do you move freely between these projects or try and finish one at a time?

I usually work on several at once—often, it takes me a while to figure out whether they are separate projects or part of the same thing, and in fact I’m still in the midst of that right now, trying to decide whether these fragments I’ve been messing with are really part of the same thing or whether I’m actually writing six or seven different books.

I was struck by the irony of the fluidity of the world that these characters live in. On the one hand, most of them make a conscious choice to leave behind the person they were at one point, changing their names or locations or occupations for a chance at a better life. But often in this disappearing act they discover that who they are is maybe too easy to shed, and not all of them find the freedom they’re looking for. In fact, many of them end up with a fate worse than the one they thought they were avoiding (see Ryan, on page 1, next to his severed hand). Here’s Lucy, on changing her identity:

Each of your characters has, in varying degrees, this “dear-God-what-have-I-done” moment. I wonder if you could talk a little about the difficulties of these shifts for them, of this kind of struggle between their internal and external identities, between the public and private personas we all move between. Without, of course, giving too much away.

As I mentioned before, I think this book is very much about adolescence—that time when all our adult choices are before us and we could be anyone, as Ryan says in his final chapter. This is stuff that really interests me, and I’ve written about it before. In some ways, the novel is a kind of extension or rewrite of my story “Big Me” and there’s a passage in that story that I mulled over:

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it’s hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years? How many end up nearly forgotten, mumbling and gasping for air in some tenement room of our consciousness…

That was one thing I was thinking about. Then I was also looking at it from the other end. As I was writing the book, my wife was very sick, and I knew that our time together was not going to be very long. I was intensely aware of the way that possibilities and futures that we imagine for ourselves would be taken away, and so I was also aware of those moments when we realize that our choices are not infinite.

When I lost Sheila, my life was shattered. Ironically, I now find myself once again in a situation in which I have to try to imagine myself into a new life, I have to try to remake myself without her, to fill up the blank slate of the future with something. I feel like I have been brought back full circle to the place I was when I was eighteen or nineteen, and I don’t like it one bit.

American culture tends to focus on the beauty and freedom of transformation, we worship the metaphor of the journey, but at the same time, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we long for home. 


In the novel, Hayden and Miles’ mother says “Oh Hayden,” she would say, with exasperation. “Why can’t you make up stories about happy people? Why does everything have to be so morbid?” This struck me as a nod to your own work, in which folks are not the particularly happy-go-lucky type, but also to the common complaint about “literary” fiction in general, that it’s too morbid, too depressing. Care to confirm, deny, or defend?

I don’t know how to answer, really. I know that I’ll never be accused of being too uplifting, and the passage you quote is definitely a nod to comments I’ve heard about my own work, and complaints that I’ve heard about literary fiction in general. Maybe I don’t understand what it means when people talk about a happy ending. Maybe I don’t understand what people want. I like the idea that literature draws us closer to other lives, and that the experience of knowing what it feels like from the point of view of someone else, and that it expands our ability to sympathize.

The question, then, is whether a work leads us to hope or towards despair. If a story moves abnormally toward “happy” resolution, isn’t that creating a false expectation, which will eventually disappoint? If a story moves toward the worst-case-scenario, doesn’t that also over-exaggerate?

I think that many people read doubt as sad and certainty as happy, but I’m not so sure.

Further Reading and Links

– You can download excerpts from each of Dan Chaon’s novels and collections on his website.

– Here’s the video trailer for Await Your Reply:

– Via last.fm, listen to the soundtrack for Await Your Reply.

- Online interviews with Chaon abound: here are two of our favorites: in The Believer; on NPR (it describes meat as a reward for writing!).

– If you’re shopping for copies of Dan Chaon’s books, support indie bookstores by buying from Powell’s: Await Your Reply, Among the Missing, You Remind Me of Me, Fitting Ends.

After reviewing The Good Thief for FWR, I continued to think about it a lot. In fact, I decided to teach it in one of my classes at the University of Michigan this winter, partly so I could think about it further. So when Hannah Tinti visited campus this spring, on the tail end of what sounded like a mammoth trip through Europe and back, I jumped at the chance to sit down with her to talk.

From the author’s website: Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her first novel, The Good Thief, is published by The Dial Press and Headline. The Good Thief is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award and winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Hannah also recently won the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for her editorial work at One Story.

Interview:

Charlotte Boulay: I’m so happy to meet you because I love The Good Thief so much and I just taught it in a class on writing about visual art.

Hannah Tinti: I have photos of visual art I’m going to use in my talk later.

Oh, great! Well, in this class we talked a lot about all the great descriptions in the book, and how you represent things visually. Were you inspired by visual art?

Work by Lee Bontecou: Image from the artist's Facebook page

When I’m working on something like this—something that has a certain time or place or mood—I have a bulletin board over my desk, and as I come across things that are in that vein, I start tacking them up. I had a couple of photos from The Gangs of New York that I had up for visuals on describing some of the places the characters went; I had photos by Edward Curtis, a photographer who took pictures of native Americans in the 1800s; I had stuff by Lee Bontecou. I love her work.

Oh, I don’t think I know her.

Her stuff is sort of steampunky. She builds out from the canvases and there are these giant weird holes.

Were you thinking of the mousetrap factory?

Work by Lee Bontecou: Image from the artist's Facebook page

For the mousetrap factory I actually had an image from a children’s book. Bontecou does giant mobiles and these kinds of canvases that are almost mechanical looking. She also makes weird giant crazy fish out of plastic. She’s a pioneering female abstract artist. And she’s still alive. I had gone to an exhibit of hers, and then I just became a little obsessed with her dark vision, and her interesting take on something that’s abstract but makes you feel a lot of emotion, particularly when you stand in front of it and it comes out at you. It almost envelops and sucks you in. It’s really cool. So I used photographs of her work, and also Edward Gorey. Then, when I was writing about the dentist, I had this photograph of someone selling teeth on the street—I think in India—and also images of early dentures. I had photographs of early mousetrap patents, and all sorts of weird images to help create that dark, slightly scientific mood.

So even if the particular reference didn’t make it into the novel they all contributed to the ethos?

Yeah, it’s generating a feeling; when you look at them, you think. That’s the kind of feeling I’m trying to capture. I have no idea how to articulate it that well, but something about those images was doing it for me.

Well, perhaps this darkness is connected to my next question. I found most of the characters in the book to be extremely sympathetic—the main characters, that is, not the hat boys. How do you make yourself inflict violence on characters that you care so much about?

I knew from the start that I wanted to have a happy or a somewhat happy ending for Ren. I wanted to end in a positive place, because it was the only way I could drive myself to put him through all of that. I am drawn to that sort of darkness, I think, from growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, and being around that Halloween stuff all the time. That Gothic world is very normal and natural to me. I’ll show some pictures in my talk tonight of graveyards, which were my playground.

Was there a point in your evolution as a writer when you realized that what was natural to you was actually really interesting material for readers?

I think I realized that I always tended a little toward the dark in things. That’s where I started to really find my voice as a writer, and I started to figure that out in grad school at NYU. I took a class with A. M. Homes, and she’s very dark. She made us do a lot of writing exercises, which had never really worked for me. But she pushed us in a lot of different directions and she challenged us to try new things. One exercise I’ll never forget was this time she gave out photographs and asked us to write something from an unusual point of view. For me it was this photograph of a kid holding a giant rabbit. He was in a sort of British, shared backyard with all this laundry, and he had a towel tied around his neck. So I had this idea that I was going to write from the mother’s point of view, and that the kid had been taken away from her by child services, so she was having to defend herself as an abusive mom by telling her side of the story. But she’s telling it without realizing what she’s revealing to this social worker. And I remember when I turned in the story, A. M. Homes wrote, “Oh, my God, this is disgusting,” and I was proud because I had grossed out A. M. Homes.

I also think it was the first time I had captured something. I think for every writer there’s one story where you make a breakthrough, where you move from the mediocre—not quite clicking into place, not knowing what’s pushing a story—into telling something that’s really exciting, or something that people are really going to want to read. That was the first time I’d ever touched that, and for me it was by going to this dark place, and then investigating it, and realizing, Why is this working for me? and Why is this working well for the readers?

And it was the first time in a workshop that people were really excited about what I had read. Every time before that was really dull and terrible. This was the first time people thought, “This is kind of cool.” And so I thought, They are reacting to something; what is it? And I think that’s partly how you find your subject. Then you just keep trying to hit it from different places, and to understand it, because often it has something to do with you inside, and you’re trying to get at that something.

It’s fascinating that you remember the photograph of the boy and the rabbit in such vivid detail.

Oh, yeah, for me it was really a changing moment in writing.

Did you pick the photograph, or did Homes give it to you?

No, she gave it to me.

So that’s a good teacher, too, to pick out something that would maybe resonate with you.

She’s a good teacher. She’s a tough teacher. She was the kind of teacher who didn’t coddle her students, and I got her at just the right time—when I was really ready for someone who wouldn’t let me get away with anything. By contrast, a lot of teachers only talk about the good stuff, or are only encouraging. But she would just say, “You did not do this. This is terrible. You are not accomplishing this POV. You are not accomplishing these characters.”

Do you feel like all writers should be able to, or develop the capacity to, take that kind of criticism?

I think that the ability to take criticism and thoughtfully implement it in your work is key to building your skills as a writer. I see this a lot from the editorial side of One Story. There are certain writers I work with who I try to show how something is not quite tracking or not quite coming across. Then I’ll give examples of how I think they can fix it, and discuss challenges and ways they can work it through. When you’re working as an editor, your relationship with a writer is a companionship, working side by side, versus the teacher telling the student, “Go this way” or “Go that way.” So, I think that there are some writers who are able to take the criticism I give them and make it their own and really turn a story toward a wonderful new direction, and there are some who I really have to handhold and lead every step of the way because they’ll do a rewrite and start taking steps backward instead of moving forward, which is a terrible thing to see as an editor. When I get a new draft of a story and I realize that they’ve just taken two steps back instead of moving the story in the direction it needs to go, then I’m just like, “Oh, God, now we’ve got to start all over again.”

Wow, that’s an enormous amount of work.

It is an enormous amount of work. The writers I see who are light on their feet and able to incorporate changes and really make them their own in this way—it’s magical when that comes together. There’s a story that I worked on with Rob McCarthy called “Stag” that we published about a year ago. Something about the ending was not quite coming together, and we kept talking about it and trying to get at what was going on in this last scene with the father and daughter. And I’ll never forget—when he finally sent me this revision, all he had added were about two sentences. Yet it suddenly made the whole story make sense. That was so exciting for me. We just talked about it; I didn’t tell him what to write. I just said, “There’s something here that’s not quite working. I don’t fully get what you’re trying to say.” And he just isolated it and it was magnificent.

So that makes it worth it.

Oh, yeah.

I get One Story on my Kindle.

Oh, cool.

How did you work out that deal with them, because I don’t know of many other literary journals that you can even get on the Kindle?

Maribeth Batcha, my business partner, pushed that; I didn’t have that much to do with it. Now the next thing is getting on the other platforms like the iPad, which all have their own delivery systems. I know we had to jump through a lot of hoops to get on the Kindle because I don’t think they saw the market for One Story, or the way it would work. But we had a contact somewhere on the high end who helped us actually get our phone calls returned, and we hooked it up. We’ve gotten a lot of new subscribers from Kindle.

It’s interesting to me because it seems in some ways that the One Story format fits the Kindle so well—I don’t know if you see One Story’s format as a response or a pushback to the amount of information we have in our lives otherwise. It’s very nice to sit there and just focus on this one thing, instead of a thousand things at once, but then I’m getting it digitally, which is traditionally a realm of over-information, so there’s a little paradox there…

I don’t read it digitally, but Maribeth does. I think that’s definitely something we were thinking about with One Story, but mainly we were just looking at the mistakes that all these other literary magazines were making, and thinking about how we could come up with a business plan for a magazine that would succeed in these places where they were failing. This is the way literature is going: you have to be leaner, meaner, and smarter. And the small presses, large presses, and literary magazines that are doing this are really finding audiences, whereas the ones that are doing things the old way are losing audiences.

So the organizations that succeed are the ones that aren’t trying to do too much?

Yes. Our thing was that the biggest problem with literary magazines is that they don’t come out frequently, so you forget that you even subscribe to them. I mean, the Kenyon Review is a great magazine, but when I get it, I’ve always forgotten that I actually subscribe to it. Whereas, when you miss a New Yorker, you’re like, “Where’s my New Yorker?” So we went to every three weeks. Originally we wanted to do every two weeks, but it was too much work. Still, when people miss an issue of One Story, they call or email us. Publishing so frequently develops a relationship with your subscribers. Our subscribers are very loyal because they’re constantly getting the magazine and feeling like they’re getting in touch with us, that they have a stake in the magazine. Also, these large journals–which are basically like publishing a book–are very expensive to print and mail and get carried in bookstores. We do subscription only. We only print as many as we’ve sold. We do print on demand.

Another aspect of our model is that we made a rule never to publish an author more than once. So, 135 issues so far and135 different writers. There’s always going to be a fresh voice, and that’s something we’re giving to the subscribers as well. Publishing One Story as we do allows the writer to take the spotlight in a way that they do not in an anthology, which normally someone would buy, flip through, read the writers they know, and skip the ones they don’t. So even though the magazine might have 5,000 subscribers, only 500 of them are actually reading your story. Everybody reads the whole issue of One Story.

The other thing is that the format is light, easy, unintimidating. The envelope is like a little gift in the mail, at a time when most people’s mailboxes are full of bills, not real letters anymore.

To change tack, my students wanted to ask you some questions. We talked a lot about how certain images and symbols in The Good Thief keep circling back; just when you’d forgotten about the wishing stone, for example, it appears again. Caitlin wanted to know at what point during the writing process you thought about which objects would have repeating roles. Did you have that plan before you started, or did that evolve?

I don’t plan or plot; I just sort of go and see what happens. It’s like using a divining rod—I try to find the scene and write it, and whatever I spit out I try to make sense of later. I think the most important thing to do is to trust your subconscious, that it is actually tying things together even though you don’t think it is. For example, the scene where Ren is in the kitchen and the dwarf comes down the chimney—I had no idea what was going on. I just had him filling his hot water bottle, and then I was bored, so I thought, What’s something that could happen right now? What if somebody comes down the chimney? Originally I thought it would be an animal, because I grew up in an old house and that used to happen all the time to us. But I figured a man, perhaps coming to rob them, would be more interesting. Then I thought, A man wouldn’t fit. It would either have to be a child or a dwarf, and I already had a kid in the book, so I made it a dwarf.

So he crawled out, and then what was he going to do? Well, I had him take a bath. I had him eat food. Then I made him go back up the chimney. I didn’t know who he was or why he was there. It took me many, many drafts until I figured out that he was Mrs. Sands’ brother, and that this was paralleling the relationship between McGinty and Margaret—brothers and sisters—and the theme of caring for each other this way.

He was also an example for Ren of a different way to lead your life. Do you withdraw from society the way the dwarf does? Do you cut off your emotions the way Dolly does, and just murder everybody and not care and not connect to people? Do you become an alcoholic like Tom? Do you lie your way through life like Benjamin?  How do you deal with not quite fitting in and not quite being who people think you should be? I didn’t know why he was there, but I knew he was important, and I just trusted that I would figure it out.

The wishing stones came in later because I originally wrote the middle of the book in the first draft, and then I wrote the beginning and the end.  So the very first scene I wrote was when they dig up the bodies and Dolly comes back to life. Right after that, I wrote the scene where Dolly and Ren become friends. Then I thought, Who is this kid, and how did he get here? Next, I wrote the chapter where Benjamin comes to pick Ren up from the school, and the chapter where he meets Tom.

When I showed it to my editor, she said I had to write more about the school and more about the lives of these kids before Benjamin arrives, to get to know the character before taking Ren on this adventure. So I went back in a fleshed out that world. That’s when the wishing stones came in, and they started coming back in different ways. Same thing with the river and the hand. Now I give one wishing stone away at every reading!

Jessica described the book as being almost cinematic. We’ve talked about the images, but she wondered whether you were inspired by any films?

Jean Simmons (young Estella) with Martita Hunt (Miss Havisham) in David Lean's 1946 film adaptation of Great Expectations

I do love movies, and I watch them a lot, but I don’t know if there was any one movie I was thinking of. I definitely visualized the book; I did see things in my head, particularly in the first chapter I wrote. I had a vision of a graveyard scene, and it was almost like a camera shot: a boy holding the reins of a horse, night, big iron fence, grave robbers, what’s the situation? So in terms of movies, I probably drew from the original Great Expectations with Alex Guinness. It’s beautifully done in black and white, and Jean Simmons plays Estella. She was probably only twelve or thirteen, and she was perfect. Another movie I thought about a lot, because it works, is Pirates of the Caribbean. I know that sounds crazy, but I think the reason that movie works so well—the first one, the other ones weren’t so good—is that it is extremely clear what each character wants. Johnny Depp wanted his boat back. Geoffrey Rush wanted to be alive again. Orlando Bloom wanted the girl. The girl wanted adventure. It was so clear. So how did the desires of each of those characters intertwine? I thought that if I could do the same thing, I could really track my characters through the book.

And the last question from my students is: Why are there so few named strong female characters in the book, the exception possibly being Mrs. Sands?

That’s one thing people ask a lot: Why is this a boy’s book? It started that way because of the circumstances. I had this scene in the graveyard, and it made sense to me that the lookout would be a boy in that situation, not a girl. A girl raises so many sexual issues and a lot of other things that I really didn’t want to deal with. I really wanted the book to be an homage to the classic boy’s adventure tales that I read when I was growing up: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist—the young boy falling in with dangerous characters, having adventures, finding his way in the end. The female characters actually make everything happen in the book. Mrs. Sands provides Ren with what he’s always wanted, which is a home and someone to love him; Sister Agnes provides Ren with what he was missing, which is what happened to him and his origins; and Jenny, the Harelip girl who only gets a name at the very end of the book, kills the bad guy and saves Ren and Benjamin. So even though their roles are smaller, they are actually making everything happen. They are powerful but minimized, and my plan for the next book is to write more of a girl’s book with more female characters, so we’ll see what happens.

Well, I don’t think of it as a boy’s book at all…and not that the larger number of male characters is a fault. I read all those classic novels as a kid and never thought about them being boy’s books.

Neither did I. I think people ask me because I’m female. If I was a male writer, I wouldn’t get asked that question as much. The same thing is true of questions about violence in the book—I think if I was a man people wouldn’t ask about that either

I read a lot of different genres, as many people do, and I read a fair amount of “YA” literature, which I think is a kind of useless category because it encompasses so much stuff, but this novel seems to be solidly placed in the literary fiction genre because it successfully combines aspects of horror, mystery, and adventure. I worry sometimes that fabulous books are getting stuck in genre cracks. Do you think about that at all? Or that sometimes because of a marketing decision by a publisher something gets categorized as “YA” when it very well could be literary fiction if some other publisher had picked it up.

Well, we did wonder whether this book was going to cross over to YA. There was never really a question that it should be published as YA, although my editor brought the galleys down to Random House’s YA area, and she made schools aware of the book. My editor’s feeling was that it would be easier for it to cross from adult to YA than from YA to adult. And it naturally found its way into YA because it won an Alex Award, which is given by the American Library Association for books that are written for adults but can be recommended to younger readers twelve and up. So as soon as that happened, which was right before the paperback came out, it started getting pushed in that direction and I started doing events at many more schools, particularly junior high and high schools. That’s been fun. I knew it would work for that market because I had been doing a lot of book clubs and I did one that was a club of mothers and sons. It was a group of friends who all have sons around the same age, and they’ve been meeting for five or six years. They all read the same book, and then they get together and cook a themed dinner with food from the book. So they got in touch with me.

What was the dinner for The Good Thief?

Oh, it was hilarious. They made the Mother Jones Elixir for Misbehaving Children. It was actually root beer or something. And they had a hilarious graveyard cake with R.I.P. written in icing and stones made of Nilla wafers. It was so much fun, and I called in and they sent me pictures, and the book really did appeal to both the mothers and the sons, and they could talk about it. When I was writing, I was not thinking about the audience. I was just trying to write the book. I knew the kind of book I wanted to write, and that I wanted to do classic, old-fashioned storytelling. I think that’s the best thing you can do. If I’m going to work on something for six years, which is how long it took me to write The Good Thief, I want to write a book that I want to read. And I wanted to read the kind of book that made me fall in love with reading, that made me really excited to read books, that made me want to stay up late at night and not put the book down, and at the same time explore issues that I’m interested in. I did try to give each story an arc that would keep the reader reading.

The book is dedicated to your sisters, and you thank your mother in the acknowledgements. We’re in an age of memoir that bashes family, or maybe I’ve just read several of those kinds of books lately. Did you have a lot of family support while writing this book? Is family support different for fiction writers than for essayists?

I think it depends on the writer. I was lucky that my family valued books. My mother was a librarian at Brookline Public Library in Massachusetts in the 60s. And my mother and father are first generation Americans—their families were immigrants, and they were each the first to go to college in their families, and it mattered a great deal to them that we love books in the same way they did. I don’t think my extended family has read my work; this is not their world. For me, growing up in that kind of environment was invaluable. I was reading above my level at a very young age because there was so much reading in the house. A special night was when we got to bring our books to the table. Instead of some families who watch TV while eating dinner as a special treat, our treat was that we got to read while we ate. That made a difference. My family has been supportive of me, although there were many times when I got the talk: what are you doing with your life? You’re wasting your time. Because it takes so long to make any money from your writing and so many people never do, really. So they definitely sat me down with concern a few times.

What are you reading lately?

I just read Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin. It was really good, particularly the first story, which kind of blew my mind.

Is he someone you knew before? That collection has been getting a lot of attention recently.

Well, it just won the Story Prize, so I was there that night and heard him interviewed. The book had been on my radar, but I hadn’t picked it up. His interview with Larry Dark that night was really interesting. I think the Story Prize is definitely helping to raise the profile of story collections, which is great. I also read a lot of books that haven’t come out yet, for blurbs and things. There’s a great book coming out called The Wake of Forgiveness that’s going to be out this fall from Bruce Machart, who we published in One Story the first or second year we started. He’s been working on this novel for a long time, and it’s a sort of epic: a sons and fathers in 1890s Texas story about horse wrangling. It’s awesome. I read so much for One Story—we have a great story coming out by a guy named Cheston Knapp. Is the first story he’s ever published, and it’s called “A Minor Momentousness in the History of Love.” It’s about an actual tennis match from Wimbeldon in 2001 between Sampras and Federer, but the story is really about the ball boys and girls and the weird love triangle going on during that very famous match. We’re really excited for that to come out in our next issue.

My last question is about the end of The Good Thief. And maybe I won’t spoil the ending for people by quoting the final line in the interview—

I always read the end of books before I read the beginnings, so I don’t care.

I think it’s just one of the most beautiful last paragraphs. I’ve thought a lot about the ending, and especially the last sentence. Teaching it was a bit hard; I’m a poet and I teach a lot of poetry in this class about visual art, and you can only go so far in explaining what something means before you ruin it. But my question is: how did you know that the final word needed to be repeated four times, not two or three or five?

I think this again goes back to writing with intuition and gut versus the technical place, which you hopefully go to later when you’re editing. Writing that last chapter I tried to go to that intuitive place. Figuring out how to end the book was hard. Originally I ended on the image of the Harelip’s shawl draped over the grave, and the idea of the grave and the person who was dead and forgotten, with the shawl giving it some connection to life again. There was the idea that this grave was chosen. I was trying to get at something there yet I wasn’t, and I realized it was because the moment was too far away from Ren. I had to go to where he was. Ren had been through these events and had these physical and emotional missing parts of himself. And even though he had found the physical part and had, in many ways, closed the emotional gap by finding a person who loved him, he was never going to be 100%. There was always going to be a part of him that was missing, and missing Benjamin, because Benjamin might reappear, but he might not. There’s no 100% happy ending. Ending in that emotional place felt right when I read it. Repeating the last word four times is better than three times because it just feels right. Normally I have a rule of threes. I give this structure lecture about the magic number three—this is the trinity: a priest, a rabbi, and a minister. When you have something happen, the first time is setting it up, the second time repeats it exactly the same way to create a pattern, and the third time something different happens and you break the pattern. That’s the classic form of writing a short story.  But there are a few stories that use four. “Reunion,” by Cheever, is a very simple one page story where he makes something happen four times and it’s amazing the fourth time it happens. It’s a great teaching story because it’s so short you can read it in class in five minutes and then you can break it apart and teach it. Doing something four times slams it home. You’re taking a risk, but for me it felt right at the end of this book.

Further Links and Reading:

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s story “The Inventor, 1972” begins here, with a sentence that ushers us into a world both familiar and strange. Some of the details feel worn. They are the near-clichés of the rural short story: the rusted old car, the fog rising off the fields, the swift and unforeseen violence. But their deployment is fresh, the voice distinct. There is the dreamy suspension of the present tense, the elided conjunction between clauses; there are the knowing inflections of an omniscient narrator and, significantly, that surprising article: not “a thirteen-year-old girl,” but “the thirteen-year-old girl.”

The main characters in the story—point-of-view passes back and forth between the injured girl and the driver of the El Camino—are at once anonymous and exposed. The reader knows them only as “the girl” and “the hunter,” yet the detached omniscient voice occasionally cracks into the higher register of free-indirect narration (“Footsteps like heartbeats! Someone is coming through the fog!”) as the story wanders further and further from the present moment—the girl on the side of the road, the hunter searching for help—burying itself in the characters’ heads and in their pasts, teasing out surprising connections between their lives. By the story’s close, the inciting event seems less an accident than an act of fate.

Of course, neither the girl nor the hunter is aware of the connections between them; their perspectives are necessarily limited, incomplete, in a way that the reader’s is not. The story is held together as much by its white space as by its text: its emotional freight is conveyed through dramatic irony, a product of reading between the lines.

That “The Inventor, 1972” closes on an upsurge of loneliness—the hunter, taken into custody by authorities, recalls a moment of intense physical connection from his childhood—is only fitting: dramatic irony is a lonely concept, dividing reader from character with a gulf of knowledge. Thus, the story isolates reader and characters alike in analogous fashions. This is a subtle accomplishment, a case in which formal innovation does not distract from a story’s emotional center but instead augments it—is, in fact, inseparable from it.

“The Inventor, 1972,” like so many of the fourteen stories in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage (Wayne State UP, 2009), evokes the ache at the center of the rural experience with startling clarity and force. The stories in American Salvage know what it means to occupy landscapes in which humans are outnumbered by animals and in which nature, beautiful and indifferent, rushes in to fill the physical and emotional distances between individuals. Set in a natural world that is (as Richard Ford described it in “Great Falls,” a story that is itself deeply eloquent on the subject of this rural ache) “without patience or desire,” Campbell’s stories explore what is uniquely human: the grinding exercise of patience, the headlong pursuit of desire.

Subtly daring and meticulously observed (a girl standing in an autumn field “kicks out rabbit holes in the yellow grass to keep warm”; the mysterious appearance of thousands of dead honeybees in the basin of a kitchen sink fills a house with a smell both salty and sweet), American Salvage captures its subject so convincingly, and from such surprising angles, that even a reader comfortable with the trappings of contemporary rural fiction may feel Campbell’s rural ache as if for the first time.

Trappings: in this context, the word isn’t accidental. Campbell’s stories are fresh entries into a subgenre—the rural short story—whose approach to its subject has too often, lately, whiffed of staleness. Readers may be familiar with rural short fiction in its too-predictable form already—stories that capture the grotesqueries, poverty, violence, and addiction at the margins of rural life in pungent detail, but with clockwork regularity.

This is not entirely a criticism. Such stories share an eye for the suffering of what Frank O’Connor called “submerged population groups” or “the Little Man,” those for whom “familiar society is the exception rather than the rule”—surely a fair description of those living within the rural experience described above. These stories belong to a tradition traceable back through Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, James Agee, and William Faulkner to the peasants of Chekhov and Turgenev, and perhaps even further still, to fairy tales (Jack was just a poor farmer before he climbed that beanstalk) and minstrelsy. Like their forebears, the very best contemporary stories in this vein—consider Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh,” Donald Ray Pollock’s “Real Life,” or Annie Proulx’s “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”—are charged with the stark empathy of a Walker Evans photograph.

At the same time, however, even these very fine stories represent a solidifying sense of how the rural experience should be dealt with in fiction. They share a tough-minded worldview and a microscopic eye for grit that is beginning to feel increasingly familiar.

It’s true, of course, that the life of the Little Man and Woman in the rural world (and in Proulx’s Wyoming stories, to be fair, every individual, rich or poor, is equally “Little” when set against that vast, implacable landscape) is going to involve hardship and grit, and that in writing these lives, tough-mindedness and understatement are preferable to melodrama and sentimentality. But the problem here is not tough-mindedness and an eye for grit as such—though it’s also true that too many rural stories render up their visceral details with the relish of fetishists, an almost cultic veneration of dirt, grime, and pain; rather, the problem is the growing ubiquity and, as a result, the predictability of this treatment.

Spotting a familiar face in a fresh context—with a new haircut, for example, or sporting a black eye, or in a strange city far from home—can be a strangely thrilling experience. Her features seem strange; we are shocked into studying her in sharp detail. Our friend has been defamiliarized. We thought we knew what she looked like already, but now we are truly seeing her, as if for the first time.

In other words, the question of whether a gritty rural story is “accurate” or “true-to-life” or even “truly felt” is immaterial. The short-story author must be more than a good describer: she must be a good artist. If she wants her reader to truly see the rural world, and to be thrilled by it, she must—without sacrificing verisimilitude—find ways of defamiliarizing the rural experience. We will come no closer to understanding the world these stories depict unless we are made to see it once again as if for the first time. And yet in many contemporary rural stories, there’s just too much that feels familiar, like the features of a face we know too well to study.

Throughout its fourteen stories, American Salvage nimbly balances these competing demands—for authenticity on one hand, for originality on the other. True, the reader will encounter familiar rural tropes: methamphetamine addiction, roadhouse bars full of factory workers, incest, old men drinking beer and jawing on the tailgates of pickup trucks. But in these deft stories, even old saws feel sharp.

This is sometimes—as with “The Inventor, 1972,” constructed as an engine for dramatic irony—the result of Campbell’s formal daring. Several stories in the collection bracket their narratives with multiple points of view; another, “The Solutions to Ben’s Problem,” is presented as a list of possible actions its titular character could take. Stories range from four to nearly thirty pages long, and not one of them ends quite where the reader expects. And at every turn, Campbell’s skill with language (her poetry collection, Love Letters from Sons of Bitches, recently received the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award) provides her fictional world with the thickness and heft of reality. She is a gifted noticer of the telling detail: in “Boar Taint,” the men in a ramshackle farmhouse sit around a kitchen table with “a forward curve to their shoulders, with their forearms resting on the table as though they were defending bowls of food, only there were no bowls.”

But even more so than through their form and language, these stories unsettle the reader by baring their brimming hearts. If it is commonplace in the rural short story to vividly depict ways in which characters are broken, then what is decidedly uncommon is Campbell’s attention to the ways in which damaged and broken lives may, as per the collection’s title, be salvaged. Without offering bromides or easy solutions, each story is inflected by an abiding respect for even the most damaged (and damaging) characters. They are like the catalytic converters torn from junked cars in the title story: “mostly they were dirty and rusted from the slush and mud and road salt, but each of their bodies contained a core of platinum.”

Here, triangulated between the grit and hardship of necessity, the loneliness of nature and a reverence for it, and the migrations of good and decent hearts—or, at least, hearts that strive in clumsy, sometimes self-defeating ways to be so—through a world that feels cold or, worse, actively hostile to their concerns, Bonnie Jo Campbell has located and renewed the rural ache.

Sharp, strange, and surprising as it is, American Salvage places Campbell among such authors as Barry Hannah, Ron Hansen, Alice Munro, Carolyn Chute, Dan Chaon, and Tony Earley as one of the most distinctive—and therefore necessary—practitioners of the contemporary rural short story.

It’s impossible, of course, to take stories as varied—and as wonderfully odd—as “The Inventor, 1972,” Hannah’s “Water Liars,” Hansen’s “Wickedness,” Munro’s “Carried Away,” Chute’s “Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie’s Rescue of Me with Blue Cake,” Chaon’s “Fitting Ends,” and Earley’s “Prophet from Jupiter” and lump them under a single heading. But it is exactly this—their singularity—that charges them with defamiliarity. Their idiosyncrasy is their artistry; their strangeness is why we should care.

Further Links and Resources:

Adam Haslett: photo credit Beowulf Sheehan

Between September of 2008 and February of 2010, our financial system experienced a meltdown that had been set in motion by years of deregulation and corporate delinquency. The strange thing? Unregulated trading, unethical banking, the prospect of a massive economic collapse—all grace the pages of Adam Haslett’s debut novel Union Atlantic, which, as the crisis was unfolding, was being edited, designed, bound, and shipped to bookstores by Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, which now had a novel of eerie prescience to deliver to the world.

Though perhaps “eerie” is the wrong word. After all, when you talk to Haslett, you learn that he is a political news junkie, someone deeply interested in and attuned to the economic and social forces that shape our lives—someone who links to “Talking Points Memo” on his website. He’s also fascinated by what he calls “the psychology of power,” and speaks of his time at Yale Law School (which he attended after the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and before writing the novel) as an immersion in the language of power. Knowing all this, Union Atlantic starts to seem less an uncanny foretelling and more the reflection of a writer who’s simply been paying attention.

The glimpse into market forces is just one dimension of Haslett’s novel, the heart of which is the conflict between Doug Fanning—a young, ambitious senior manager at Union Atlantic bank—and Charlotte Graves, a retired history teacher on whose family’s Massachusetts land Doug has built an ostentatious mansion. Charlotte believes her two dogs have begun talking to her—one in the voice of Cotton Mather, the other channeling Malcolm X—and admirers of Haslett’s celebrated 2002 short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, will recognize the empathy with which Haslett draws this solitary character, whose mind sometimes utterly distorts reality and sometimes grants her extraordinarily sharp perceptions of it. Rounding out the central characters are Nate Fuller, a high school student who becomes infatuated with Doug while being tutored by Charlotte, and Henry Graves, Charlotte’s brother, the president of the New York Federal Reserve.

You Are Not a Stranger Here was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and has been translated into fifteen languages. The winner of the PEN/Malamud award in 2006, Haslett has published fiction and essays in such places as The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope All-Story, The Barcelona Review, Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Stories, and National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. We sat down to talk when he visited the University of Michigan as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series.

Interview:

Kate Levin: I’m excited to talk about your new novel, but first, take us back to the beginning of your writing life. What were your earliest stories like?

Adam Haslett: I started writing short stories when I was in college. The first short story I ever wrote was about a mother, in a house, on her own, getting progressively drunker as the day went on, while her husband was at the office. It was called “1952,” and the story ends with the woman going to visit her neighbor—because she’s just sort of alone—and the neighbor is an old lady, and the woman finds her dead. So, you know, it was a bright start. [Laughter.]

I think fundamentally I started out, and remain, a Romantic in the capital “R” sense of the word. There are emotional states that I have experienced, or that I intuit, or that I have imaginatively experienced, and I want to communicate those experiences. And often, particularly in my first book, those are states of extremis.

I’ve always begun with people alone. My characters always begin with themselves, and so first it’s the relationship of the characters to themselves—that constant unending narration we have in our heads—and then they move into the world. And I want to track how they continue to relate to themselves once they encounter the world.

Before getting your MFA, you’d spent a year as a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Did you arrive at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then, with a bunch of stories and a clear idea of what you wanted to work on there?

Provincetown, at the Fine Arts Work Center

No. Other than to keep writing, no. I spent most of my time at Provincetown writing one story, “War’s End,” which is in the book. At Provincetown I had the privilege of a year, full-time, no distractions, no domestic stuff, no classes, no job, nothing, so that’s when I became what I think of as sort of a professional writer, you know—every day, I wrote.

So you went from writing alone in your room in Provincetown to being a student at Iowa. Was that the first time you’d had lots of readers’ eyes on your work, and what was the experience like for you?

Well, I took one writing class in college, which functioned in a workshop style, so I wasn’t entirely new to it, but certainly it was more intense. I think if anything I was leery. I should back up and say that I went in with very low expectations—I went expecting nothing except time to write, and if I were to get anything from a workshop, or a teacher, then that would be gravy. That was my own understanding of what I was doing. So in that sense, I think it was easier to have a good experience, because it turns out I was there with some good people and had some good teachers.

One last MFA-related question before we leave that world: I noticed that your new novel’s main character, banker Doug Fanning, has a young secretary who’s described as feeling powerless because she has “an advanced degree in short fiction.” I hadn’t realized until then that she was supposed to be a former MFA student! Was that a little bit of gentle derision on your part, or a wink and a nod to those of us MFA-ers who might be reading?

[Laughter.] It was sort of a wink and a nod. It’s also from Doug’s point of view—and Doug thinks of himself, because of the control he has at the bank, as what he calls “an artist of the consequential world,” not the “observer of effete emotion” that Sabrina Svetz wants to be. So that’s Doug making a distinction between art and the world, which is certainly more pejoratively drawn than I would draw it.

Your story collection, You Are Not A Stranger Here, was published in 2002. You’ve said in an earlier interview that you begin a short story by hearing a voice or catching hold of a certain sentence rhythm. Do you summon a voice or a rhythm when you’re sitting down at your desk? In other words, do you write your way into a certain voice? Or do you hear it first and then try to nail it down with words?

It’s more the former. The reason you have to spend so long at your desk is because you need to be there when it happens. It’s nice to think that you’d walk down the street and something would come to you whole cloth, but it doesn’t happen much. It has to do with a certain calming of the mind, quieting the voices of distraction. I meditate every morning before I work, and that’s a process of getting rid of a lot of the things that block out those quieter, subtler voices in your own mind. So, I don’t know if I can say that I can summon those voices, but maybe I can hear them better. It’s sort of a negative skill, the skill of concentration. It’s the skill—increasingly difficult, it seems to me—of blocking out a manic culture, in order to be able to listen to something that, when you first hear it, is a wisp of a nothing of an echo. And if it’s ever going to have life, you have to pay attention to it, take it seriously, let it be more important than other things that are way more produced and slick and loud.

To dive into the collection itself, the two opening stories, “Notes to My Biographer” and “The Good Doctor,” seem to have an interesting inversion to them. In the first, the narrator, an aging inventor in the middle of a manic episode, rails against “the mental health establishment” and appears to be off his meds. The second story is told from the point of view of a psychiatrist who tries to engage a reclusive patient in talk therapy, only to find that the woman just wants to take her meds. Now, I could be reading far too deeply into it, but did you put these stories side by side to show us the two sides of that “mental health establishment,” patient and practitioner?

No, the only factors that went into the sequencing of the stories were that there were certain stories I wanted to keep away from each other, so that dictated where they would go. I was aware, also, that half were set in England and half in America, so I was doing a little bit of variation of that.

Ah, so much for my theory. So, while the subject of mental illness isn’t the only thing that unifies the collection—there’s also the solitude of the characters, for one—it’s certainly present in a number of the stories. When did that theme make itself apparent to you? Or did you just think of yourself as writing isolated stories, with some outside readers then pointing out, hey, you could cohere your collection around this theme?

Well, it was certainly something that came from outside. First of all, I didn’t think of myself as writing a collection, until I signed a contract for it. So, definitely, I thought of them as individual stories about individual characters—and they’d been written over four years. I didn’t really think of them as having shared themes in particular, so it did take readers, critics… “mental illness” was sort of the headline of the New York Times review, so it traveled under that banner.

Interesting—how did you feel about that “banner” being placed over the book?

Well, that’s complicated… there’s a lot of things to be said. On the one hand, there’s the real biological fact of mental illness, but I also think that phrase is a kind of conceptual suitcase that people can keep closed. And once you open it, you find out that it’s a label for a variety of human experiences that many of us have the edges of, and these lines aren’t so easy to draw. So the phrase itself rarely appears in the collection. I’ve said before that if I’d set the same characters a hundred years earlier, they would have simply been considered eccentrics. That I’m writing about people whose experience is, in this day and age, seen through the lens of psychiatry, says as much about the culture as it does about those people.

In between writing your collection and your novel, you went to law school at Yale. Was that based at all on a desire to have an occupational footing in the “consequential world,” as your character Doug thinks of it?

Yeah, sure. There’s something fascinating and appealing and alluring to me about the psychology of power, and particularly the psychology of anonymous power. And so going to law school was in a sense like learning a language. Law is the language of power in this country, probably more than in any other country in the world. So that was interesting, but I think the exercise of it—the work—is just too boring. Do you know what I mean? So I don’t know that I could ever sustain the interest to try to be a powerful person. I don’t think that’s what I’m interested in, power of that particular kind. But it’s allowed me to be a fly on the wall in a lot of places where I otherwise wouldn’t have been.

Did you write fiction while you were there?

Well, the way it worked was I went from Iowa to there, and then I signed the contract for the book [You Are Not A Stranger Here] in the spring of my first year, and then I took the next year off to finish the book. And then I went back to finish law school, and the book came out the last year I was there. When I was actually attending classes in law school, I would say I did more editing than actual drafting, but that was just a question of time.

I’m curious about how you taught yourself to write a novel. Did you read a bunch of novels and kind of try to learn by diffusion, or did you just let yourself write your way into problems and write your way out?

I think it was more the latter. I mean, I had a guiding overarching ambition as a writer—not particularly for this book, but just as a writer—which had to do with the two things I’ve loved most in my reading, over the years: the sense of social scope in the nineteenth-century novel, and the psychological intensity of Modernist fiction—Faulkner and Woolf and Proust. And I didn’t want to sacrifice one to the other, or have only one or the other. I wanted social scope and I wanted interior intensity. So my ambition was to try to get both of those things into the book. I started with characters, but some of them were characters that were already in a place, in a world, that was demanding their attention. In a sense, the conjuring act happened right away—I mean, if you choose to write about the head of the New York Fed, it’s not going to be a quiet domestic novel.

One of the things that struck me about Union Atlantic is just how much “world” you give us. There was a piece by the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels in the last year or so arguing that literary novels should be more like “The Wire”—so, avoid locking us in a room with two people and telling us about their relationship, and instead give us more social context, more political context. First of all, I don’t know if you’re into The Wire—

Sure, sure, I love The Wire.

Me too. So, as a novelist, what’s your take on what Michaels is saying?

Emile Zola (1840-1902)

I mean, Tom Wolfe twenty years ago wrote an essay in Harper’s that was basically saying that writers should be more like reporters. I think this is a theme that goes all the way back to Zola and naturalism and writing that is a kind of reportage as opposed to just the marriage plot. I mean, at that point, everything was in the realist vein. Zola is someone who was fascinated by—the way The Wire is—social strata. In The Wire, you know by what kind of car they drive where they fit into the Baltimore world, and one of the things I love about reading Zola is, like, one of the first things you learn about someone is how much they earn. Not because he thinks it’s the deepest thing, but because he knows how close to the surface that is in everybody’s understanding of how people fit in. So, yeah, that’s the curious outward-looking part of me that wants to have that—and also, just as someone who reads a lot about politics every day in the news, and thinks about it a lot, and gets worked up about it a lot, it is frustrating to read so much contemporary fiction that has essentially lobotomized what is an omnipresent, 24-7 flux of stuff that’s coming at us. So, unless that’s sort of justified, it’s beginning to border on the inexcusable. It’s an incomplete rendering of our experience.

Now, you can write historical fiction, which I, you know [laughter], shouldn’t say too much about—but you can write historical fiction and obviate these problems, right? You can write a novel set in the nineteenth-century, or the middle of the nineteenth-century, and you can write a marriage plot, and generate all your drama in the conventional manner that has been for two hundred years. But obviously, you know, that’s not my project.

You mentioned that you’ve written some short stories since completing the novel.

Not many, but yeah.

Is that sense of “the world” more a part of the picture in your short fiction now that you’ve had the experience of writing this socially-minded novel?

Well, it’s interesting, because the last short story I wrote was a short story in which the main character is Obama, so, that’s in “the world.” [Laughter.] He’s dealing with a lot. And that came about because an editor said, “Look, do you want to do this?” I didn’t just sit there and say, “Oh, I think I’ll write about Obama.” But it was interesting, and I enjoyed it. The short answer is, I don’t know the answer, because other than that one project I haven’t really gone back to writing short fiction and thinking about it. I think the point is that if you want to show relationships between micro and macro systems, or experience, it’s very hard to do that in the form of one character, because very few people, given the breadth of—how low the low are, how high the high—the gaps in income and privilege and power that we live with, it’s very hard to put that in one story.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. So, let’s dive more deeply into the novel, starting with Doug, the banker. I was surprised to see that the novel opens with a scene of military combat in 1988, when Doug’s a naval officer on a ship called the Vincennes, in the Persian Gulf. The present of the novel takes place in the run-up to the Iraq War. Which aspect of the character came first—his military identity or identity as a finance guy? How did you build this character?

Well, I thought at the beginning that Henry [Graves, the president of the New York Federal Reserve in the novel] would have an opposite number at the bank, Union Atlantic, in Jeffrey Holland, the head of the bank. But I found him to be a little dull on the inside. So, I was writing a scene of Jeffrey Holland, and Doug kind of came in as the second-in-command and he just seemed more…I was just more interested in that figure. So that’s how he began, and that’s how I started writing more about him. I’m trying to remember the first scenes I wrote of Doug… I can say that I wrote the Vincennes scene in the Persian Gulf not at all clear if it would be in the novel, because, you know, it could easily not be, and it wasn’t clear to me that it was Doug, but it became so. I guess it was understanding him in office life that was what first gave me a way in to Doug. There’s a whole culture, or a hierarchy and a balancing act, with all these different actors in the building, and he’s got a relationship with all these different people and is controlling information.

In that opening Vincennes scene, we witness Doug committing a highly immoral act, and at that point I thought, well this is a character we’re just going to indict—but actually he becomes much more inflected over the course of the novel. We learn about his class background, his mother’s alcoholism. Can you talk about these elements—when they developed, and how important they are to Doug’s characterization and to the book itself?

Well, that was pretty early on. That Finden (the town) represents something very particular to him—that I knew early on. There’s a “fuck you” contained in the act of building this house, and it is heard by his neighbor. So, that sense of resentment of the privilege in which he now takes part was key to this kind of anger. He’s an angry guy, and… how should I put it… both the worlds that he’s operated in—the military and the financial world—if there’s an emotion that vivifies those worlds, I would say it’s a certain kind of male anger. It’s more obvious in the military, it’s more abstracted in finance, but it is powerful. And we have been living with its consequences for a long time. And we still are. I didn’t realize this until later, in writing Doug—I didn’t realize that that’s what I was getting at, why it was important to have the military and the finance stuff together. Not together, like, we see the systems operating together, but through an individual, who participates in both cultures.

Besides Doug, there are three other central figures in the novel: Charlotte, Henry, and Nate. In a recent interview, you were asked which of these four characters you identify with most, and you’d said that in creating each of these characters, you had to expose a part of yourself. I’m really interested in that idea, and wonder if you could say a little more about it.

I think it’s a messy, kind of always-in-process… process. [Laughter.] I don’t think you can write about a character for a long period of time if they don’t interest you, and the interest comes from them being both different, and yet preoccupied by, bothered by, rankled by things that bother, preoccupy, and rankle you. So, in a sense, I always find myself most comfortable writing about someone, or sets of events, that are thirty degrees off from my own experience. Enough to be able to freely—and without trying be true to my life or anybody else’s—import things that are of interest to me. It’s not autobiography, nor is it biography of character. I think it’s like letting those quieter voices that we were talking about earlier get louder so that you realize that a character is headed in a certain direction, and then the brave thing is to let go and let them be something that might be shameful to yourself. I think shame is actually pretty heavily involved in the process.

Confronting one’s own shame?

Yeah. Writing about people wanting things that you find shameful to want. And even if you know you’re writing about a character, the book’s going to have your name on it, which is a good thing—if no serious internal trouble has been overcome in the writing of a book, then there’s not a lot of blood on the floor, and it’s not as interesting to me.

You finished your book the week Lehman Brothers collapsed. How did it feel to you, when the economy actually tanked, to know that you’d just finished a book that very wonderfully delineates—for people who don’t know how banks engorge themselves, and skirt regulations—how a collapse like that could happen?

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Image from Wikimedia Commons (photo credit: Dmadeo)

It was disorienting, because I’d spent so long thinking and worrying over what level of detail to go into on these subjects in the book itself, and wondering if anybody would even care about the Fed or banks. It was disorienting, because it was such an outsized event for everybody, and yet for me, when I started reading about meetings of bankers at the New York Fed, I was like, oh yeah, I wrote that scene about a year and a half ago. So that was uncanny. And I suppose, selfishly, the concern was that the book would be—I mean, I knew that it was inevitably going to be read in light of that. It just can’t not be. But my only worry was that that would somehow overweight the financial aspects of the book at the cost of the rest of the things that are going on, whereas what had led me into the Fed in the first instance was not banking or finance per se, but a way that we’ve chosen to govern ourselves, which is the tyranny of abstraction in economics as a natural science, which is so much bigger than the Fed.

You’ve said that you started working in the novel after reading a book about the Fed. I was wondering what other kinds of research you did for the book, particularly of the non-reading kind. Did you gain access to the corridors of power?

I did not go and visit investment banks. I did visit the New York Fed—I was an associate at a law firm where a guy there used to work for the Fed, so I was able to go into the New York Fed. Now I currently have a friend who’s a lawyer there, so I’ve been into the gold vault, and I’ve seen the boardroom, I’ve seen the building, so that was all very helpful. And I met with a recently retired Fed official about some of the mechanics. But most of it was reading. Other than some scene setting, ninety percent of it was reading.

A character like Jeffrey Holland, say, who you said you’d imagined early on as a central character—there’s something about the way you describe his bearing, his physical presence, that made me think you’d done some careful observing of powerful people.

I was thinking of Bill Clinton. I was thinking of the large, seductive, sharp, smart, garrulous, kind of winner, and all that that comes with. I mean, he’s not as smart as Clinton, but, yeah.

Do you have a second novel in the works?

I have ideas, I have characters, I have some very preliminary sketches, but I also have a desire to approach it differently, and quite possibly write some of it in the first person.

Besides trying out the first person, how else are you thinking of approaching this second novel differently? Will you outline or map it out?

Well, you know, I’m not an outliner. And I didn’t know a lot about the plot of this book until it developed as I went along. I don’t know whether it’s so much an outline as wanting to know—which maybe I can’t, and it’s just a fantasy—what the central tensions of the book really are, so that one can move to the starting point of that tension. As opposed to the 200 pages of work where you’re like, oh, it’s about that, at which point you then start again.

Further Links and Resources:

• For more about Adam Haslett’s work, or to find links to his recent writing, interviews, and features, please visit the author’s website.

• Check out “Night Walk,” Haslett’s most recently published short story, featuring protagonist Barack Obama.

• Or read Haslett’s story “Notes to my Biographer,” published in 1999 in Vol. 3, Issue 3 of Zoetrope: All Story.

• You can also read “The Beginnings of Grief,” which appeared in 2002 in Issue 32 of The Barcelona Review.

You know, I order everything.
You know everything I order.
I know everything you order.
You order everything—and I know.
I order everything—and you know.
Everything I order, you know.
Everything I know, you order.
I order you: know everything.
Order everything! I know you.

You and I know, order is everything.

The most basic level on which the order of information is critical is within the sentence. Syntax creates meaning. It can provide clarity, but it can also create mystery and tension. Mystery and tension, it can create. Created is mystery; also…….tension.

Here is the first sentence of Thomas Bernhard’s novel Correction:

After a mild pulmonary infection, tended too little and too late, had suddenly turned into a severe pneumonia that took its toll of my entire body and laid me up for at least three months at nearby Wels, which has a hospital renowned in the field of so-called internal medicine, I accepted an invitation from Hoeller, a so-called taxidermist in the Aurach valley, not for the end of October, as the doctors urged, but for early in October, as I insisted, and then went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret, to begin sifting and perhaps even arranging the literary remains of my friend, who was also a friend of the taxidermist Hoeller, Roithamer, after Roithamer’s suicide, I went to work sifting and sorting the papers he had willed to me, consisting of thousands of slips covered with Roithamer’s handwriting plus a bulky manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone.”

None of the information in that sentence is difficult to comprehend; but the arrangement of the information is deeply, and intentionally, disorienting. A variety of information passes by that seems quite worthy of being the subject of the sentence—or of a sentence—and of our attention—but the syntax, as well as the length of the sentence, seems to make everything subordinate. We’re confronted with surprising qualifiers: “the field of so-called internal medicine,” “a so-called taxidermist.” There’s even a sort of syntactical joke, via a parenthetical clause: “went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret.” That mention of not taking a detour is a detour on our voyage through the sentence. The end of that journey—the mention of Roithamer’s manuscript–feels oddly anti-climactic. After a rush of relief that the sentence has finally stopped, our first impulse might be to go back and look again at all the things the narrator has alluded to, the narrative premise he’s suggested.

Long sentences, repeated phrases, and unorthodox punctuation are defining elements of Bernhard’s prose. I do not offer it here as a model we should all set off to imitate; personally, I have to work up a certain amount of intellectual energy to engage with Bernhard’s work, which is made more challenging because he isn’t very fond of giving his reader opportunities to stop and reflect. In the edition I own, Correction is 271 pages long. It’s divided into two chapters, each of which consists of a single paragraph.

By all accounts, Bernhard was a pretty miserable fellow, a fact that offers some consolation to the reader seventy or eighty pages into the first paragraph. Misery does love company; so I’ll offer you one more sentence from the book, a slightly shorter and much more direct one. Sixteen pages into the novel, our narrator is standing in Hoeller’s garret, contemplating the task ahead of him—going through his deceased friend’s papers and, more important, trying to comprehend his life’s work. The narrator says,

As I stood there looking around Hoeller’s garret it was instantly clear to me that my thinking would now have to conform to Hoeller’s garret, to think other than Hoeller-garret-thoughts in Hoeller’s garret was simply impossible, and so I decided to familiarize myself gradually with the prescribed mode of thinking in this place, to study it so as to learn to think along these lines, entering Hoeller’s garret and learning to adjust, to entrust and subject oneself to these mandatory lines of thought and make some progress in them is not easy.

We understand that Bernard, the author, is talking to us, his reader, about the challenge he knows he’s given us; and he is, in his way, offering a sign of compassion.

It’s often easier to see something in its most extreme form. It may be obvious that to read Bernhard we must, like his narrator, “familiarize ourselves with the prescribed mode of thinking in this [book], to study it so as to learn to think along those lines…because to entrust and subject oneself to these mandatory lines of thought and make some progress in them is not easy.” This is what many of us discovered for ourselves as we learned to read “difficult” writers, which, depending on your own tastes, could mean the James Joyce of Ulysses, the Faulkner of Absalom! Absalom!, Proust, Pynchon, Hemingway, or even, for some readers, Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. This, too, is something we try to help our students overcome—the resistance to engaging with new ways of conveying information through language, which is to say new—and so difficult, at least initially–ways of thinking.

But this adjustment we make as readers to a writer’s delivery of information isn’t necessarily a matter of difficulty. Fans of Jane Austen admire her not so much for her plots but for her wit, which relies heavily on what she chooses to tell us when, and how she chooses to tell it to us (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” The combination of bold assertion and the passive voice makes the narrator present yet remote; and “must be in want of a wife” falls into place with the timing of a punch line.). The same holds true for Dickens and, in our day, writers as wide-ranging as David Foster Wallace, Charles Baxter, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, and Richard Russo—to read their work is to enter a world defined by, among other things, the particular way they convey information through the arrangement of language.

I’ll offer two more examples, both from work that will probably seem much less challenging, much more immediately accessible, but which is no less aware of its sentence-level strategy than Bernhard’s novel.

Within a sentence, diction can be used to clarify or to strategically obscure. The first sentence of Antonya Nelson’s short story “Strike Anywhere,” is, “This was the next time after what was supposed to be the last time.”

Again, there’s nothing about that language or its arrangement that is difficult to comprehend; the trouble is, we’ve got signifiers, but no specific content. “This was the next time after what was supposed to be the last time.” What is “this”? we think. The next time for what? The last time for what? All we know for sure is that “this” is an occasion, and it’s significant because it wasn’t supposed to happen.

The next sentence puts us at ease by offering clear and explicit information—two characters and a bit of action: “The father parked at the curb before the White Front, and the boy found himself making a prayer.”

So we’ve got a boy and his father, and the boy seems to be worried. The tension is maintained, but so is the mystery—we still don’t know what’s going on, or why it’s important. The boy’s worry mirrors our own unease about not knowing what the narrator is referring to.

The paragraph continues, “It was Sunday, after all, and this was what his mother did when faced with his father’s stubborn refusal to do what he said he’d do. Or not do what he said he’d not do.”

That first sentence created a desire to know certain information: What is this significant event? And why isn’t it supposed to happen? We still don’t have an answer, but the context for the question is becoming increasingly clear—so while we’re eager to have those initial questions answered, we’re content to wait a little longer, because we’re getting what seems to be important information. By the third paragraph, when we learn the father and son are parked in front of a bar, we think we’ve got a clue; but by that time the focus of the narrative is no longer the simple fact of what’s going on, but the difficult situation the boy is in, and his father’s obliviousness, or self-interest, and the mother’s influence, or lack of it. The story has shifted our attention from a minor mystery to a more significant one. On some level or another nearly every successful story works this way, leading us from one mystery to another, like stepping stones across a river.

This is a useful example because we might sometimes tell ourselves that every sentence in a story should be beautiful, or finely wrought, or exquisitely detailed, or that it should present the reader with a new and brilliant figure of speech. But that first sentence–“This was the next time after what was supposed to be the last time.”—is one I might be inclined to mark in a student manuscript, scrawling something like “vague’ or “confusing”—because it would probably be followed by similarly abstract assertions. The combination of the abstract and the concrete, coupled with the deliberate release of contextualizing information, is what makes this writing strategic. In that first sentence, Nelson is not trying to find her way into the story—she’s deliberately creating questions she knows we’ll want answers to.

Simply omitting information doesn’t create a sense of mystery or tension; you don’t know my shoe size, but you don’t care. The reader needs to be made to want to know what’s being withheld or obscured. If the reader isn’t provoked to want to know more, the story has no forward momentum, no sense of urgency.

Like Nelson, Charles D’Ambrosio writes clear and precise prose which moves seamlessly from the colloquial to high diction and back. For our purposes I’d like to isolate a few sentences in his story “The Scheme of Things” to show how they subtly prepare the reader for a bit of trickery. The story begins with description of one of the two main characters:

Lance vanished behind the white door of the men’s room and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed. Gone was the tangled nest of thinning black hair, gone was the shadow of beard, gone, too, was the grime on his hands, the crescents of black beneath his blunt, chewed nails. Shaving had sharpened the lines of his jaw and revealed the face of a younger man….He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist.

That first sentence, “Lance vanished behind the white door of the men’s room and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed,” and especially the use of “vanished” and “utterly,” might suggest something of a magic trick. Lance didn’t simply open the door, or go into the men’s room—he “vanished.” He didn’t just look different; he was “utterly changed.” The next sentence is a nice bit of sleight-of-hand, as D’Ambrosio tells us what Lance looked like earlier by telling us what’s missing; Gone was the black hair, gone was the beard and so on. That emphasis on what has disappeared makes ominous the otherwise simple statement, “He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist.” One thing we know by this point in the first paragraph: Lance is no evangelist; and we suspect he is up to no good.

Having established that possibility, the story introduces the other main character, Kirsten, and the boy at the service station who inspects their damaged car. When the boy goes to get material for a temporary repair, Lance sits on the hood and looks around. We see brown clouds of soil, dust on the leaves of a few dying elms, some trailers across the street, and then this:

One of the trailer doors swung open. Two Indians and a cowgirl climbed down the wooden steps. It was Halloween.

On first reading, this arrangement of information feels like a deadpan joke. The narrator could have told us earlier that it was Halloween—that certainly would have given us a different context for Lance’s transformation. But it would have been a wasted gesture in the first paragraph, given the story’s purposes. Here are those plain and direct sentences again:

One of the trailer doors swung open. Two Indians and a cowgirl climbed down the wooden steps. It was Halloween.

Notice what the second sentence doesn’t say: “Three children, two dressed as Indians and one as a cowgirl, climbed down the wooden steps.” No, the omniscient third person narrator asserts that what exits the trailer are “Two Indians and a cowgirl.” Also absent: the word “costume.”

So on the next page we accept the narrator’s assertion that when Kirsten, the other main character, walks toward the intersection, “Ghosts and witches crossed from house to house, holding paper sacks and pillowcases.” Not children dressed as ghosts and witches, not people in costumes.

The narrator then rewards our close reading by adding to the motif:

The street lights sputtered nervously in the fading twilight…The casual clothes that Lance had bought her in Key Biscayne, Florida, had come to seem like a costume and were now especially flimsy and ridiculous here in Tiffin, Iowa.

Lance vanishes and reappears, looking as bland as an evangelist; Indians and cowgirls and ghosts and witches walk the streets; but Kirsten feels as if her clothes are a costume. Subtext is beginning to take shape, but we have no way to see that the next lines are part of it:

A young girl crossed the road, and Kirsten followed her, She thought she might befriend the girl and take her home….

The interaction with the little girl transpires over the course of two pages; then there’s some other action; and so quite some time passes before we learn that the little girl Kirsten met was actually killed in an accident years ago. She is what some of us might call a ghost.

If there were no preparation for that revelation, the story would feel like a cheat. But from its very first sentence, the story has announced that people are not what they appear to be; and by introducing those two Indians and a cowgirl before we know it’s Halloween, the story has essentially telegraphed the illusion that’s about to follow. Rather than feel tricked, when we realize that the little girl was a ghost, we recognize that the narrator was telling us more than we could understand, withholding information but also drawing our attention to the very thing we should be looking at.

At the start I said that the first level at which the release of information is important is within the sentence. But information is significant even on a smaller level. Just two weeks ago, for an undergraduate workshop, the students and I read the draft of a story about a young man required to attend a rehab clinic. The subject is serious and the writer’s treatment of it was serious. But one phrase gave many of us extraordinary delight. It comes when the main character is assessing one of his fellow addicts; we’re told that this young woman suffered from “elf inflicted wounds.”

The artful withholding of a single letter transformed an otherwise mundane tale into a fascinating one. I’m certain I’m not the only reader who immediately pictured a little man digging his pointy ears into the woman’s shin, then returning to his tree to bake more cookies.

But I can hear you now: “That was probably a mistake, a typographical error.” While I went out of my way not to ask the author, the abashed look on his face when someone quoted the phrase, gleefully, makes me suspect you might be right.

So I’ll conclude with what I know is a deliberate omission—this from no less a writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald, and from no less a novel than The Great Gatsby. We all know those wonderful sentences in Gatsby, from “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since” straight through to “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

But here are a few sentences you probably don’t remember:

“I’m very sad, old sport…Daisy wants us to run off together. She came over this afternoon with a suitcase all packed and ready in the car.” Gatsby shook his head wearily. “I tried to explain to her that we couldn’t do that, and I only made her cry.”

“In other words you’ve got her—and now you don’t want her.”

“Of course I want her,” he exclaimed in horror. “Why—Daisy’s all I’ve got left from a world so wonderful that to think of it makes me sick all over…it’s all so sad because I can’t make her understand…I’m only thirty-two. I might be a great man if I forgot that I once lost Daisy.” (89/90)

Or how about these gems:

“You know, old sport, I haven’t got anything…I thought for awhile I had a lot of things, but the truth is I’m empty, and I guess people feel it. That must be why they keep on making things up about me, so I won’t be so empty. I even make up things myself.” (116/117)

To be fair, it’s not the sentences themselves that are so excruciatingly awful—it’s the content. They make the mistake of directly articulating what is much, much better left unsaid. Which is why Fitzgerald cut them from the final draft. [They appear in the draft published as Trimalchio.]

I offer them to you because it’s heartening to remember that even wonderful writers do some truly dreadful writing. But more important, The Great Gatsby reminds us that narration is an act of translation. We aren’t recording a story, we’re creating it; and a defining element of the creation is the language we use, and our arrangement of it.

Editor’s Note:

It is our great pleasure to publish this essay by special guest Peter Turchi. It was originally presented as part of the 2010 AWP panel “What to Say and When to Say It: Disclosure of Information for Optimal Effect in Fiction,” and is an excerpt from a forthcoming book about writing, visual art, puzzles, and mysteries.

Peter Turchi is the author of five books including, most recently, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. He co-edited, with Andrea Barrett, the forthcoming anthology A Kite in the Wind: Twenty Fiction Writers on Their Craft (Trinity University Press, Spring 2011), as well as The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work, also co-edited with Barrett, and with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to his Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. The recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, Turchi taught in and directed the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers for 15 years. He currently teaches at Warren Wilson and at Arizona State University, where he is Director of Creative Writing and Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

• Read Antonaya Nelson’s story “Strike Anywhere,” published in the Winter/Spring 2003 issue of Failbetter.com.
• You can also read Charles D’Ambrsosio’s story “The Scheme of Things,” published in 2004 in The New Yorker.